Love is benign only when it gets what it wants. Otherwise love can be far more destructive than mindless sex.
Good prose is solitary work.
It made him feel like a mom, ineffectual and sexless.
Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).
But that was something, wasn't it? It was good to be needed. It was better than being alone. It even felt good to be used. Being used brought you deep inside the machinery of the world.
Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennessee Williams had for . There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, My tits are o...
I hate hating myself. It's boring. But there's nobody else to hate.
The fact of the matter is that readers and audiences are never blank slates: individuals see in a work whatever they need to see at that moment.
She was sitting up. She lifted and pulled at her blankets, but it was gone. The hippopotamus of wisdom was nowhere in sight.
Political activists rarely like fiction of any kind. Literature is about ambiguity, mixed emotions, and guilty pleasures. Politics is about ideals and action.
Not until she stood at her sink, splashing cold water on her face, did she remember her little hippo. What the hell was that about? When did her unconscious get so fucking whimsical? And what fine tru...
A writer’s unconscious is difficult to read, but the imagination is rooted in the unconscious.
Throwing himself a party was like rubbing his nose in his failure to connect with people.
The orgy room at Dave's Baths was democracy made flesh; race and social standing were checked at the door along with clothes.
Vidal himself joked that at a certain age lawsuits took the place of sex.