The first things that babies can notice is sex; the first thing that you can tell about a person when you see them walking down the street is their gender.

The easier sex gets, the less intimate every sexual act gets. In the Victorian period, a kiss was like a f - k. And now, you know, when actual sexual acts become so easy, their intimacy declines and their meaning declines.

We're in Trump times - we're in the time this misogynist hate clown is the leader of the free world, and when Putin has made abusing your wife legal, and transgender bathrooms have just been disallowed in school. There are all these political setbacks. And there's no question that those setbacks are very real and need to be treated as civil-rights issues.

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

When you look at the biggest study of the American dream, the number-one correlate for upward mobility is having two parents in a home. It doesn't matter if they're male or female.

Marriage is this black box which is the key to all social and political problems; the family is the unit.

Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time.