“Death is the opposite of everything. Trying to race ahead of my death—to get in front of it, then turn around and face it, let it catch up with me, pass me, and then take my place behind it.”

“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”

“Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely, you may need to silence everything in your own room, you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.”

“It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. … But whatever you took home from the movies was only a part of the larger experience of losing yourself in faces, in lives that were not yours. … The strongest experience was simply to surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen.”

“I have always thought: China is as far as anyone can go. Still true. When I was ten, I dug a hole in the back yard. I stopped when it got to be six feet by six feet by six feet. ‘What are you trying to do?’ said the maid. ‘Dig all the way to China?’ No. I just wanted a place to sit in. …My refuge. My cell. My study. My grave. Yes, I wanted to dig all the way to China. And come bursting out the other end, standing on my head or walking on my hands.”

“Sometimes I had to forget that I was a woman to accomplish the best of which I was capable. Or I would lie to myself about how complicated it is to be a woman. Thus do all women, including the author of this book.”

“The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.”

“I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.”

“My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.”

“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.”