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

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Youth is to venture

Life is sacred.

Bad taste makes the day go by faster.

A dog is not intelligent. Never trust an animal that's surprised by it's own farts

It's a terrible thing when a person dies, whatever the circumstances. A hole opens up in the world, and we need to pay the proper respects. If we don't, the hole will never be filled in again.

I mean, I am pretty fabulous. Am I not?' 'You're a pillar of fabulosity in the community,' I tell him.

I'm overflowing with stories, delighted and quite mad with the beauty and tragedy of them.

In the successful organization, no detail is too small to escape close attention.

I looked back at some of my earlier published stories with genuine horror and remorse. I got thinking, How many extant copies might there be, who owns them, and do they keep their doors locked?

Learning appears as a way of staying young, perhaps of staying alive, and also as a way of growing up, perhaps facing death.