I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.