Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. - Martin Amis

Heat, money, sex and fever -this is it, this is New York, this is first class, this is the sharp end.

It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true — unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward — shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.

In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes — homosexuality, sexual disease, and death — about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.