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.

As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.

For a woman there is nothing more erotic than being understood.

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

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.

The mammary fixation is the most American of the sex fetishes.

But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.