“By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.”

“At its heart, Gothic Fiction is the introvert's "Hero's Journey" where heroes and heroines must navigate the uncharted territory of the mind in order to solve the mystery of their life's adventure.”

“To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant —because you're always going against the conformity of the group.”

“The pervert.""He prefers to think of himself as sexual deviant.""Semantics.”

“Aren't most romance heros, or heros in fiction of any kind, generally superior to real men? Same goes for heroines and real women.”

“Adornment, exoticism, affectation are all willed decadent strategies meant to pervert the texts they made. Decadent texts often live in their descriptive excursions, in their evocation of dreams, mysterious places and states of mind, in their excess of words, not events. The surface of the texts, the sound of the words, point to themselves as manufactured, as illusion. The decadents attempted to create texts that announced themselves as artifice.”