I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.

The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.

Humor is an antidote to isolation.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.