There are very few heroines in literature who have defined their lives morally rather than romantically and likewise but a handful in film.

Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

...(Charles) Reich discredits reason because it has been used to justify the war in Vietnam, which is like deciding that because your mother has cooked you a few bad meals you must never eat again.

Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery.

[On swingers:] They have gone from Puritanism into promiscuity without passing through sensuality.

The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women’s inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behaviour that merely to recognize it is to risk unravelling the entire fabric of civilization.