I think the important thing about sisters is that they share the same minute, familiar life-style, the same little sets of rules. Therefore they can keep house with each other late in life, because they share the same bunch of housewifely prejudices. The important thing about women today is, as they get older, they still keep house. It's one reason they don't die, but men die when they retire. Women just polish the teacups.

Keeping even the most humble talent wrapped in a napkin becomes the more reprehensible the greater the emergency.

In almost any society I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have a love affair with an old Russian. And I stopped saying that when a little dancer in the front row put up her hand and said, 'Does he have to be old?

Love is the invention of a few high cultures ... it is cultural artifact. To make love the requirement of a lifelong marriage is exceedingly difficult, and only a few people can achieve it. I don't believe in setting universal standards that a large proportion of people can't reach.

I don't consider my marriages as failures! It's idiotic to assume that because a marriage ends, it's failed.

To the extent a person makes, invents or thinks something that is new to him, he may be said to have performed a creative act.