Paradise is exactly like where you are right now... only much, much better.

Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.

It is difficult to write a paradise when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse. It is obviously much easier to find inhabitants for an inferno or even a purgatorio.

It is a curious thing that every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.