I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.

The 1960s was probably the first time in history that young people were recognized as a big group of consumers and as a commercial proposition for Madison Avenue. Advertising played a major role in creating the ethos of that era - the idea that, "Here it is, and you can have it now." I know that many kids thought that the ethos of the 1960s was due to their own peculiar virtues, but, in fact, it had a lot to do with the realities of the marketplace and commerce.

if you understand something, you don't forgive it, you are the thing itself: forgiveness is for what you don't understand.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

It isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying.

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.