“I’m a good novelist and I’ll get better. I’ve found my calling and if I have my way I’ll be turning out books for the next half-century, books that will blow people away. But right now all I want is to be read.”

“It’s easy to love the Cockettes… I traveled with them for 10 days, and it was pure insanity all the way.”

“You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized.”

“There are times when the subway, like the city itself, seems so grotesque that, indeed, one wonders how this entire enterprise can continue to call itself human. Much less continue.”

New Year's Day 50 years ago: "But in its monumental ugliness it commands that special morbid fascination that all New Yorkers feel toward their city, despise it as they may."

"Maybe if we all get drunk enough we'll all have blackouts so trackless and remarkably sustained that we'll never remember all the reprehensible things we said and did to each other, hence no guilt"

"I feel battered by culture shock — ­an experience that has mainly served to teach me how little I know, and how much I have falsely assumed"

“What made 147th Street so bad was the kids. They had all grown up right in the neighborhood; now they were killing it, and each other.”

“The supreme package, blonde, glit­tering, gilded, beautiful beyond belief, high priestess, eternal virgin on the brink of rape, queen of films, queen of the universe, the last laugh at them all.”

"Jeddy Gates was that increasingly rare phenomenon in American life — a legend who has not become a celebrity"