“Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.”

“The key is never, never work. Nothing is more aging than work. It's not only the strain of getting up in the morning for work, but it's the resentment that settles on your face”

“I learned very early in life that I was always going to need people more than they needed me.”

“Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.”

“In the cafe there was a lot of stylized cattiness, but this was never unkindly meant. Nothing at all was meant by it. It was a formal game of innuendos about other people being older than they said, about their teeth being false and their hair being a wig. Such conversation was thought to be smart and so very feminine. It was better, I need hardly say, to seem like a truly appalling woman than not like a woman at all.”

“The world now seems a stunningly ignoble place. It has not really grown all that much worse but appears to have done so because we know so much more about it than we did.”

“The average woman, unless she is particularly ill-favored, regards loving and being loved as a normal part of life. If a man says he loves her she believes him. Indeed some women are convinced they are adored by men who can be seen by all to be running in the opposite direction. For homosexuals this is not so. Love and admiration have to be won against heavy odds. Any declaration of affection requires proof. So many approaches made to them are insincere - even hostile. What better proof of love can there be than money? A ten-shilling note showed incontrovertibly just how mad about you a man is. Even in the minds of some women a confusion exists between love and money if the quantity is large enough. They evade the charge of mercenariness by using the cash they extort from one man to deal a bludgeoning blow of humiliation upon another. Some homosexuals attempt this gambit, but it is risky. The giving of money is a masculine act and blurs the internal image.”