I would trade many an art-film classic for the final exchange between Redford and Streisand in front of the Plaza.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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