Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people.

Whoever had known sexual jealousy, that most destructive of emotions-and this would be so for men no less than women-had known madness and had now to know sympathy for someone who had been carried by jealousy this one terrible step too far, to murder.

Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.

[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured.

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.