Golf is an exercise in Scottish pointlessness for people who are no longer able to throw telephone poles at each other.

Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty - as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

When women talk about "privacy" they mean abortion rights, and the millions of words feminists have written about "a room of one'sown" refer to psychological space, rarely to physical solitude. For most women being alone is tantamount to being deserted.

In social matters, pointless conventions are not merely the bee sting of etiquette, but the snake bite of moral order.

Showing up at school already able to read is like showing up at the undertaker's already embalmed: people start worrying about being put out of their jobs.

Agoraphobia was my quirky armor against a gregarious America.

The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag withoutair, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.