You can make a sordid thing sound like a brilliant drawing-room comedy. Probably a fear we have of facing up to the real issues. Could you say we were guilty of Noel Cowardice?

We turned on one another deep, drowned gazes, and exchanged a kiss that reduced my bones to rubber and my brain to gruel.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

The satirist shoots to kill while the humorist brings his prey back alive and eventually releases him again for another chance.

We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through.