“The very purpose of existence it to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think of us.”

“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.”

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

“I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum.”

“The whole set of stylizations that are known as "camp" (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about "camp" is that it has been fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, "Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.”

“It's been agony but I couldn't have done it any other way.”

“I like living in one room and have never known what people do with the room they are not in.”