“Boy, this really wasn't one of his days. He just couldn't put a foot right. It was a situation all too familiar to me, this business of setting off on the wrong foot and doggedly remaining there. Only I'd never watched it from the outside before. It was fascinating.”

“It's difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really *have* lived; that I never really will live--exist or whatever--in the sense that other people do. It drives me crazy. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else's life surrounded by plate glass. I mean I'd like to break through it just once and actually touch one.”

“I have never known anyone with less money and less visible means of getting hold of it. He had slept around everywhere, from the floors of friends’ studios, to the Metro. There were days when he had literally no money at all, and after a string of such days he would go to the blood bank and sell his blood. More often than not he spent this money on tickets to the ballet.”

“Thanks for the hint," I laughed. "And thanks for the invitation too. Only I don't know if I can make it - " I stalled automatically, marveling at the strength of my reflex - the never-appear-too-eager one, for of course nothing would have stopped me.”

“Besides, I hated him but I loved him too. Yes. I know all about that sort of thing. Christ, I should, I'd heard nothing else my last two years in New York. 'They have this terrific love-hate thing going,' everybody said about everybody else. 'You watch, it's going to destroy them-.' But never about me. When I took to someone I took to them, and when I took against them ditto. Mostly I felt indifference.”

“He tried to kiss me. One of the few things that had impressed me in college was a Southern girl’s account o how she avoided being kissed on the doorstep of her house once by wearing a flower in her hair and sticking it in her mouth when she said good night. Only I had no flower.”

“[W]hat upset grownups of both sexes about Elvis' performance was that he had broken the deepest taboo of all. He used his body as rhythmically and erotically and seductively as a woman--that was the forbidden territory he had entered. It was not only repulsive and offensive--it was nauseating--the word most used. It was an attack on male dignity.The kids, however, not yet grown into the stereotypes of gender, saw in him an exhilarating physical freedom.”