“See a storm. See a bad spanking. See your boy is ugly. Decide your boy is the pope. Blow the pope away with an imaginary gun. Fellate your own fingers afterward.”

“I shall drink to the Pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

“It's also important to read the newspaper every day to see how the pope is doing. Here in Rome, the pope's health is recorded daily in the newspaper, very much like weather, or the TV schedule. Today the pope is tired. Yesterday, the pope was less tired than he is today. Tomorrow, we expect that the pope will not be so tired as he was today.”

“This man was the pope, president, and god of dodging the topic. Too bad for him he was dealing with the queen, holy mother, and empress of seeing through a man’s stream of shit.”

“I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.”

“You know when you see a gorgeous boy on the street and you say to your friend, "Look at him!" and then your friend makes a face like, ugly? We all have such totally varied tastes that someone is going to look at you and think, yum-yum dee-lish, no matter what you think you look like. You just have to learn to see what they see. ”