I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.

Marriage is like pleading guilty to an indefinite sentence. Without parole.

We don't know much about the human conscience, except that it is soluble in alcohol.

All the flower children were as alike as a congress of accountants and about as interesting.

The freedom to make a fortune on the stock exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It's middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.

The law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks, and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted.