Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.

We are on a sexual binge in this country. ... One consequence of this binge is that while people now get into bed more readily and a lot more naturally than they once did, what happens there often seems less important.

Californians tend to be outspoken. When the great migration began, the more timid people must have stayed home, and the bolder ones headed west.

In a nation of celebrity worshipers, amid followers of the cult of personality, individual modesty becomes a heroic quality. I find heroism in the acceptance of anonymity, in the studied resistance to the normal American tropism toward the limelight.

The mark of a true crush... is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.

trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.

I reserve my greatest admiration for those who continue to struggle to embrace the whole impossible tangle of snakes that is our society; those who fight to identify and strengthen human connections, and defeat polarizing forces that strain to drive us apart.