“We act as a conduit for the observers’ unexpressed desires, the silent appreciation they may contain for anything; a lover, a river, a building even”

“I remember the ecstasy of first going to a nightclub wearing eyeliner. Drenched in hairspray and glitter, dancing to Lou Reed records. I felt as if I was living on the outside, in a realm that most people could never enter. For so long I had felt completely alone, but makeup made my isolation feel special. The world came to life – the streets were no longer grey and cold, they sparkled with sordid possibility. But the most resonant pleasures in our lives are always individually defined. When you expect the world to appreciate them they simply expose their own bland uniformity. I learnt that the more unusual you are, the more personalised pleasures the world reveals to you.”

“You consider me for a moment, perhaps balancing the weight of your fear against the loneliness you will later feel in your room if you do not speak now”

“She didn’t think that by hanging a chandelier from the ceiling you made a room with a chandelier. She felt you’d made another world, which you could slip in and out of by some vague process of application”

“Rather than being lovers in order to breathe, we are queer in order to escape asphyxia.”

“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”

“Power is not something to be destroyed: that remains beyond our means. What we can do, however, is understand its mechanism and do everything possible to disrupt it. Whether we do this by overriding power instead of censuring it, by working towards the generalized confusion of powers, by driving the rules of the game over the edge, we must always remember that these activities will continue to be exercises of power, nocturnal perhaps, but not the desired emergence of weakness between all men.”