"I'm now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. It's tonic. I roar with laughter. I want to denounce everybody, tell everybody off. I go to my typewriter as I might go to my machine gun. But I'm safe. I don't have to face the consequences of 'real' aggressivity. I'm sending out colis piégés ['booby-trapped packages'] to the world."

"It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin."

"He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser."

"Most of my reading is rereading."

"What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine."

"To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better."

"Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it's the secret to good sex."

"Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material."

"Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are."

"One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience."

"Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

"Depression is melancholy minus its charms - the animation, the fits."

"The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form."

"I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path."

"No "we" should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain."

"How much self-love comes in the guise of selfless devotion!"