I was cured all right. - Anthony Burgess

‘She is a goddess,’ said Ambrose, drunkenly and stoutly. ‘…And she wants me. She’s the pursuer…She’s the epitome of woman, not,’ he said, ‘not a second-hand bundle of coy erogeneity draped,’ he said, ‘in an all-too-diaphanous robe,’ he said, ‘of pudeur.’

Well before James Joyce, Conrad was forging a vocabulary for the contemporary soul. This book grants us another opportunity to brood over a notable literary martyrdom. [review in the London Independent newspaper of Joseph Conrad: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers]

They have turned you into something other than a human being. You have no power of choice any longer. You are committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine capable only of good. And I see that clearly — that business about the marginal conditionings. Music and the sexual act, literature and art, all must be a source now not of pleasure but of pain.