Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.

Love is a great wrecker of peace of mind.

When Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike, what he meant was that there are no happy families.

There is some consensus: There's obsession, there's never satiety, and there's always remorse. For me, the big thing is that you're always breaking a promise - for example, you promise yourself you're just going to have coffee with a man, then before you know it, you're in bed together.

The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe.

There were a number of books about Bill Wilson, and by him, but a lot of the basic biographical tasks had not been done.

A wedding isn't for the bride and groom, it's for the family and friends. The B. and G. are just props, silly stick figures with no more significance than the pink and white candy figures on the top of the cake.