I am convinced of the validity of contradiction. There are many worlds. Each is true, at its time, in its own fashion

Man's indecency to man all over the world rules out the idea of humanity as an actuality. It is a dream of young idealists. In practice a misnomer

I portray myself as wicked, hoping I will not be regarded as wicked. But I may be wicked in the biblical sense

I enter a whorehouse with the same interest as I do the British museum or the Metropolitan - in the same spirit of curiosity. Here are the works of man, here is an art of man, here is the eternal pursuit of gold and pleasure. I couldn't be more sincere. This doesn't mean that if I go to La Scala in Milan to hear Carmen I want to get up on the stage and participate. I do not. Neither do I always participate in a fine representative national whorehouse - but I must see it as a spectacle, an offering, a symptom of a nation.

You can never trust a human being to behave as you would have expected in a given circumstance