“It may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.”

What my parents thought of this, I don’t know. But they bore it. And the real problem was not my sin, but my unemployability.

To lose is not always failure.

Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

If love means anything at all it means extending your hand to the unlovable.

The English think that incompetence is the same thing as sincerity.

Health consists of having the same diseases as one’s neighbors.

Fashion is not style. Nay, we can say more: Fashion is instead of style. Style is an idiom springing spontaneously from the personality but deliberately maintained.

If I have any talent at all, it is not for doing but for being.

I was amazed to receive later a substantial sum for sitting in my room and talking about myself. If only I could get some of the back pay!

If I were God – and I never understand why I’m not – I should say, “Shop around, I don’t think you’ll find a better bargain than here.”

It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn’t give enough.

Fashion is a way of not having to decide who you are. Style is deciding who you are and being able to perpetuate it.

When asked, ‘Shall I tell my mother I’m gay?’, I reply, ‘Never tell your mother anything.

I had a friend who had two degrees of being made up: when invited I would say ‘Can I make up?’ and he would say ‘Oh yes – tinted?’, or he would say, ‘Oh yes – clotted?’

People say to me, “When did you come out?” But I was never in! When I was about six, I was swanning around the house in clothes that belonged to my mother and my grandmother which I’d found in an attic, saying, “I am a beautiful princess!”

I grew up being an artist, but also rock-climbing and traveling the world and teaching my kids.

It is true that we are made of dust. And the world is also made of dust. But the dust has motes rising.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!

For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art.

The 31th of May, I perceived in the same water more of those Animals, as also some that were somewhat bigger.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you’re okay with who you are or where you came from.

Masturbation is not only an expression of self-regard: it is also the natural emotional outlet of those who…have already accepted as inevitable the wide gulf between their real futures and the expectations of their fantasies.

Healing in a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.