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.

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.