All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify

Choose your self-presentations carefully, for what starts out as a mask may become your face.

The self... is not an organic thing that has a specific location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.

The normal and the stigmatized are not persons, but perspectives.

Stigma is a process by which the reaction of others spoils normal identity.

Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.

Society is an insane asylum ran by the inmates.

Any group of persons – prisoners, primitives, pilots, or patients – develop a life of their own that becomes meaningful, reasonable and normal once you get close to it.

Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.

There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged.

So I ask that these papers be taken for what they merely are: exercises, trials, tryouts, a means of displaying possibilities, not establishing fact.

Zen gives you tremendous dignity. There is no authority anywhere. Freedom is utter and ultimate.

...dark embers smolder inside me - one touch and they flare - who would have thought memory combustible, or near you bright sparks appear?...

Diesel sucked air. "You keep fondling me like that, and I might have to marry you.""I'm not fondling you. I'm looking for the keys!""Could you look a little more gently? You're scaring my boys.

I very carefully levered up an eyelid and shut it again fast. A merciless sunbeam had squirted straight in, making my brain bleed.

I couldn’t fight the tide, so Idecided to float along.

Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations.

Look, if Givenchy is going to lend you a dress, I'm not going to turn it down. I would wear that dress to just go out and buy a pint of milk if they would lend it to me.

You can destroy your now by worrying about tomorrow.

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

I wrote a great deal of verse. In fact, every time I fell in love, which was rather often, I burst into the emotional sort of thing which is perennially salable.