“Writing poetry's,' I looked around the solarium, but Madame Crommelynck's got a tractor beam, 'sort of . . . gay.' '"Gay"? A merry activity?' This was hopeless. 'Writing poems is . . . what creeps and poofters do.' 'So are you one of these „creeps”? 'No.' 'Then you are a „pooof-ter”, whatever one is?' 'No!' 'Then your logic is eluding me.”

“Now, whatever you do, don't say anything, because no one must know that Liberace is gay.""Excuse me?" I said. "I'm eight. I know he's gay.”

“Hey, you fucking creep, in this shithole! I've got a monopoly on that one.”

“Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.”

“And you say Paris is gay, but it has its down times. You say go in the spring and not the summer, because watching the autumn creep through the Rive Gauche preparing for winter is hard.”

“One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.”