Only Saints and the Insane

Forced carnal knowledge, whatever else it may be, is good physical exercise and represents meaningful variation on normal marital relations. As pleasure, however, it has its limitations. For myself, I was so distracted that night be scratches, bites and screams, and by wondering whether one could be arrested for violating one’s wife (was pinching a More ...

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. Major psychological disturbances, ‘identity crises,’ are caused when an individual begins to change the audience for whom More ...

Lil and I had met and mated when we were both twenty-five. We formed a deep, irrational, obviously neurotic need for one another: love – one of society’s many socially accepted forms of madness. We got married: society’s solution to loneliness, lust and laundry. We soon discovered that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being More ...

‘You’re dreaming. There are no Utopias. There can be no perfect man. Each of our lives is a finite series of errors which tend to become rigid and repetitious and necessary. Every man’s personal proverb about himself is: “Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people.” The whole tendency is . . More ...

Why is it that I can lead my life of quiet and desperation with complete poise, dignity and grace, while most women I know insist on leading lives of quiet desperation which are noisy? I was giving the question serious thought when I noticed Lil and Arlene crawling toward me on their knees, their hands More ...