Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions.

Power is the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter.

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

Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Quoting, like smoking, ... is a dirty habit to which I am devoted. But then ... I am a professor of English literature; it is an occupational hazard.