“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”

“... and everybody will have what they never yet have had, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure-- leisure to sit down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean, and really want, and really intend to do with their lives.”

“Freud suggests that in order to love someone else, one must love themselves; it's a classic "needs before other needs" argument. Unfortunately, no one really loves themselves . And, if they do, they need to get to know themselves better. Unfortunately, no one is really happy.”

“Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.”

“I'm talking about an intense, private bonding between a dominant personality and a submissive one. Between two people who have chosen to make a loving gift to one another of themselves...not just of their bodies, but of the parts of themselves that they hold back from the rest of the world. The control dynamic in a relationship like that may look uneven, but the power is really quite...balanced”

“Everybody is taken in at some period or another. [...] In marriage especially. [...] There is not one in a hundred of either sex, who is not taken in when they marry. Look where I will, I see that it is so; and I feel that it must be so, when I consider that it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest with themselves.”