“You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")”

“Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")”

“...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... ("Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read")”

“The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")”

“After Bill got his shot, a little color crept into his face and he would become almost coy. It was a gruesome sight. I remember once he told me how he'd been propositioned by a queer who offered him twenty dollars. Bill declined, saying "I don't think you would be very well satisfied." Bill twitched his fleshless hips. "You should see me in the nude," he said. "I'm really cute.”

“It's my side. I have found the pain. It is in my side, and I isolate it and define it, and arrange the other pains around it. I tell myself that pain is information, that I am learning to map the spaces of my own body. Then my body's feelings cascade toward my side, and pain pours over its outlines and erases them. ("Marriage")”

“I find no reason to think that aging is genetically determined. Genes do not provide information for the development of the individual beyond growth and the reproductive process in which the genes are transmitted to the next generation. Once past the reproductive stage, the individual has served the purposes of preservation of the species, and then he is on his own. The wrinkled human face is the victim of gravity and of cumulative errors in the reproduction of cells. Since aging is not programed, but is a badly improvised interference with youthful beauty, we have improvised an operation to counteract its effects. Aging is a form of misinformation. If we get the facts right, you will be able to read it in our faces. ("Motherhood")”