You can flush my ashes down the toilet, for all I care..

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort..

Male friends do not always face each other; they stand side by side, facing the world..

One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard..

Ideas move fast when their time comes..

as the years go on a sense of deep patience comes over one; one seems to know the virtue of ripeness, and the danger of rushing events..

one sank into the ancient sin of anomie when challenges failed..

Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is t….

As long as women are isolated one from the other, not allowed to offer other women the most personal accounts of their lives, they will not be part o….

The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible..

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains..

Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted..

... success always worries academics, when it moves into the popular world..

Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning..

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt..

Whether animals admit it or not, they and I communicate..

Today's youth seem finally to have understood that only by freeing woman from her exclusively sexual role can man free himself from his ordained role….

We women have lived too much with closure: "If he notices me, if I marry him, if I get into college, if I get this work accepted, if I get this job" ….

New York is not like London, a now-and-then place to many people. You can either not live in New York or not live anyplace else. One is either a love….

Today's shocks are tomorrow's conventions..

The sign of a good marriage is that everything is debatable and challenged; nothing is turned into law or policy. The rules, if any, are known only t….