[Gay Talese's Thy Neighbor's Wife] is for me a secretly deep history of a generation of middle-class American males, my own, which was taught by parents and athletic coaches and scoutmasters and military chaplains and quack doctors and so on to be deeply ashamed of masturbation and wet dreams. And the hidden plea in the book is one which first appeared in my eyes when I was fourteen, say, and which has not vanished entirely to this day. It is part of the mystery of me. The plea is addressed by old-fashioned males forever full of jism to any pretty human female, on the street, in a magazine, in a movie - anywhere. The plea is this: 'Please, pretty lady, don't make me play with my private parts again.'

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should n…

Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking …

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible dis…

I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex …

The only thing about masturbation to be ashamed of is doing it badly.

'I was adopted by pro-life Christians when I was a kid. [Mimes gunshots] Does my penis make me a bad boy? That's what they told me!' Please, give me the Satan-…