The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

Androgyny suggests a spirit of reconciliation between the sexes.

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed.

Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.