taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor. It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.

One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.

Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.