Old age is the new childhood.
Maybe you never stop feeling like an eight-year-old in front of your parents. You resolve to be your mature self, to react in this considered way rather than that elemental way, to breathe evenly from...
I admired him more than anyone but I didn't wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to...
However angry I was with him, however much I wanted to humiliate Terry, I suddenly saw such humanity in his eyes, and in the way he tried to smile - such innocence in the way he wanted to understand m...
Apparently, now, though, we writers and artists are not allowed to give offence. We must not question, criticise or insult the other, for fear of being hounded and murdered. These days a writer withou...
When Victor Hugo was buried, you couldn’t find a whore in all of Paris. They were too busy paying their respects. That was a man – and he still has a show on in the West End.
You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them.
Those magical fucks, when everything else falls away.
As it was, she always did whatever occurred to her, which was, admittedly, not difficult for someone in her position, coming from a background where rick of failure was minimal; in fact, you had to wo...
I can only think how good life on earth can be, at times. What grief two people can give to one another! And what pleasure!
How utterly our past suffuses us. We live in all our days at once.
Harry leaned forward. You put your penis on the page.
But why do people who are good at families have to be smug and assume it is the only way to live, as if everybody else is inadequate? Why can’t they be blamed for being bad at promiscuity?
Security and safety were the reward of dullness.
Being in love means being at the mercy of someone's childhood.
Women only wear beautiful clothes so that men will want to remove them.
If there’s no sacrifice, there’s no love.
I don't want to be loved. I want to be desired. Love is safety, but desire is foul.
How many artists have created while drunk, high on laudanum, opium, chloral or amphetamines? What have antidepressants ever done for culture?
The city blew the windows of my brain wide open. But being in a place so bright, fast and brilliant made you vertiginous with possibility: it didn't necessarily help you grasp those possibilities. I s...