Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were. . . in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.

The writer is either a practising recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.

The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

What is most beautiful in virile men is sometimes feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being -- while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up.