Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism.

Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.

They danced the dance of the outcasts for the outcasts who watched them, amid the louring trees, with a blizzard coming on.

The whore is despised by the hypocritical world because she has made a realistic assessment of her assets and does not have to rely on fraud to make a living. In an area of human relations where fraud is regular practice between the sexes, her honesty is regarded with a mocking wonder.

There are lots of things that you can brush under the carpet about yourself until you're faced with somebody whose needs won't be put off.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

This dance was the dance of death. The clowns danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness.

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

As for my father, few souls are less troubled. He can be simply pleased with us, pleased that we exist, and, from the vantage point of his wondrously serene old age, he contemplates our lives almost as if they were books he can dip into whenever he wants. His back pages, perhaps.