Ardent, intelligent, sweet, sensitive, cultivated, erudite. These are the adjectives of praise in an androgynous world. Those who consider them epithets of shame or folly ought not to be trusted with leadership, for they will be men hot for power and revenge, certain of right and wrong.
The married are those who have taken the terrible risk of intimacy and, having taken it, know life without intimacy to be impossible.
We in middle age require adventure.
People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they’ve contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.
Life has this in common with prizefighting: if you’ve received a belly blow, it’s likely to be followed by a right to the jaw.
One cannot make up stories; one can only retell in new ways the stories one has already heard.
Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.
Only a marriage with partners strong enough to risk divorce is strong enough to avoid it.
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 to the two players, who seek no public trophies.
In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
It’s hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world.
Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.
What marks a writer is this: until she – or he, of course – writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn’t really happened, it hasn’t shape, form, reality.
Everyone likes to talk shop, which is the most interesting talk in the world, in the beginning.
Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?
Shifting problems is the first rule for a long and pleasant life.
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 lover or hater.
The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.
Why do long marriages occasionally endow their inhabitants with a rare kind of equilibrium otherwise almost unknown in human relations? My guess is that the value of the moment has at last overshadowed the long history of resentments, betrayals, and boredom.
Power is the ability to take one’s place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one’s part matter.