fear has always been a diminisher of life. Whether bred in the bogs of superstition or clothed in the brocades of dogma and ritual, the specter of death has reduced the living to supplicants, powerless.

The curse of the romantic is a greed for dreams, an intensity of expectation that, in the end, diminishes the reality.

A seventeenth-century painting can be "modern" because the living eye finds it fresh and new. A "modern" painting can be outdated because it was a product of the moment and not of time.

The Republicans think they have a corner on morality.

Generosity with strings is not generosity: it is a deal.

The suppression of civil liberties is too many less a matter for horror than the curtailment of the freedom to profit.

flirtation ... is a graceful salute to sex, a small impermanent spark between one human being and another, between a man and a woman not in need of fire.