English majors understand human nature better than economists do.

I had spent years thinking about one thing while I was doing another. I had, in fact, prided myself on being able to do two things at once.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known.

Art doesn't exist if you just do what you're told. It only exists as an exercise of individual taste and freedom.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

The one thing ... maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open.