We lived our lives as if life was forever. To live one's life without a sense of time is to squander it..

Wit isn't a useful instrument of defense; it may make a short-run appeal, but it creates a backlash- one saw this in the Hiss case and the Oppenheime….

Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real..

Writers are what they write, also what they fail to write..

I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner..

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between ….

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it..

I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world..

Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we're a myth-making people..

Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life..

My career as a critic still lay in the future but unconsciously I may have been preparing for it. They were not easy companions, these intellectuals ….

[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it ….

Where there are children, people become neighbors; they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another..

At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process to keep….

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial e….

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals..

Whoever had known sexual jealousy, that most destructive of emotions-and this would be so for men no less than women-had known madness and had now to….

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each oth….

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that ….

Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhel….