I'm afraid I'm not sufficiently inhibited about the things that other women are inhibited about for me. They feel that you've given away trade secrets.

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

People with bad consciences always fear the judgment of children.

Be truthful... and pay attention. I would also recommend the avoidance of credit cards.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.