Everybody is bound by some social rules. But I think that artists need some kind of freedom to explore their minds and that some of them tend to take that freedom to live a little more openly or a little more dangerously, sometimes a lot more self-destructively, than other people.

People always think their world is coming to an end if they're exposed, and of course it isn't coming to an end; it goes right on exactly the way it always was.

Some people who think they are in unhappy marriages are just in unhappy bodies.

There is cruelty in divorce. There is cruelty in forced or unfortunate marriage. We will continue to cry at weddings because we know how bittersweet, how fragile is the truth. We will always need legal divorce just as an emergency escape hatch is crucial in every submarine. No sense, however, in denying that after every divorce someone will be running like a cat, tin cans tied to its tail: spooked and slowed down.

Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.

Reader, you forget that economics precedes religion; worship grew out of eating, not the other way around.

I've told the same story twelve different ways, but I think that's just part of what writers do. Once may not be enough.