Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.
It would mean that the castle is not yet generating enough eroto-energy.
The notion of a natural propensity for vice is essential to Sadeian psychology; vice is innate, as is virtue, if social conditions are unalterable. This straitjacket psychology relates his fiction dir...
It was the fault of the wedding-dress night, when she married the shadows and the world ended.
But there is no mysterious virtue in Justine's suffering. The martyrdom of this Christ-figure is absolutely useless; she is a gratuitous victim. And if there is no virtue in her suffering, then there...
Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual.
A fairy tale is the kind of story in which one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.
Watching a film was like being a voyeur, living vicariously.
They had imagined too often and too much and so they had exhausted all their possibilities. When they embraced each other’s phantoms, each in his separate privacy has savoured the most refined of plea...
I’ve changed a lot since 1969, and so has the world; I’m more benign, the world is far bleaker, and the people in would now be edging nervously up to the middle age they thought could never happen, t...
But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority. Shebelieves that, by ignoring it, she can abnegate it. More than anything, shewould like to be human; but she does not know if that...
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Eldritch ways,
All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched
[...] he had examined the world by the light of the intellect alone and had seen a totally different construction from that which the senses see by the light of reason.
Women do not normally fuck in the active sense. They are fucked in the passive tense and hence automatically fucked-up, done over, undone.
When he combs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he can stand as still as a tree, when he wants th...
We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual...
There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry...
The waxen fingers of the Countess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called L'Amoureux. Never, never before… never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving L'Amoureux. She shakes,...