We Have Educated Ourselves Into A World

Only In The Theatre Was It Possible To See The Performers And To Be Warmed By Their Personal Charm, To Respond To Their Efforts And To Feel Their Response To The Applause And Appreciative Laughter Of The Audience. It Had An Intimate Quality; Audience And Actors Conspired To Make A Little Oasis Of Happiness And Mirth Within The Walls Of The Theatre. Try As We Will, We Cannot Be Intimate With A Shadow On A Screen, Nor A Voice From A Box.

When Irony First Makes Itself Known In A Young Man's Life, It Can Be Like His First Experience Of Getting Drunk; He Has Met With A Powerful Thing Which He Does Not Know How To Handle.

Book Lovers Are Thought By Unbookish People To Be Gentle And Unworldly, And Perhaps A Few Of Them Are So. But There Are Others Who Will Lie And Scheme And Steal To Get Books As Wildly And Unconscionably As The Dope-taker In Pursuit Of His Drug. They May Not Want The Books To Read Immediately, Or At All; They Want Them To Possess, To Range On Their Shelves, To Have At Command. They Want Books As A Turk Is Thought To Want Concubines - Not To Be Hastily Deflowered, But To Be Kept At Their Master's Call, And Enjoyed More Often In Thought Than In Reality.

I Don't Think I Would Ever Write A Book With What Anybody Could Call Pornography In It, Because I Feel That Pornography Is A Cheat. It Is An Attempt To Provide Sexual Experience By Secondhand Means. Now Sex Is A Thing Which Has To Be Experienced Firsthand, If You Are Really Going To Understand It, And Pornography Is Rather Like Trying To Find Out About A Beethoven Symphony By Having Somebody Tell You About It And Perhaps Hum A Few Bars. It's Not The Same Thing. Sex Is Primarily A Question Of Relationships. Pornography Is A Do-it-yourself Kit--a Twenty-second Best.

My Curiosity Was In No Way Cruel. Deviations From The Commonplace Attracted Me Strongly, As They Still Do; And To Me The Hermaphrodite And The Living Skeleton Were Interesting For The Same Reason As Was Creatore, Or The Resplendent Guardsmen Of The Bands - Because Such People Did Not Often Come My Way, And I Hoped That They Might Impart Some Great Revelation To Me, Some Insight Which Would Help Me To A Clearer Understanding Of The World About Me.