Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.

With children who have never said a word, parents tend to assume, for better or for worse, that there isn't any language there.

We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences.

I like the relative literacy of at least some of England. I mean, I didn't come for the food or the weather!

I had always thought of myself as fairly tough and fairly strong and fairly able to cope with anything. And then I had a series of personal losses. My mother died. A relationship that I was in came to end, and a variety of other things went awry.

There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.

It is easy to keep secrets by being honest in an ironic tone of voice.