Family life itself, that safest, most traditional, most approved of female choices, is not a sanctuary: It is, perpetually, a dangerous place.

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever.

Scenery can be a violent stimulant.

Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all.

Novels, since the birth of the genre, have been full of rejected, seduced, and abandoned maidens, whose proper fate is to die.

The human mind can bear plenty of reality but not too much intermittent gloom.

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

Nothing fails like failure

Why can't people be both flexible and efficient?

Perhaps the rare and simple pleasure of being seen for what one is compensates for the misery of being it.

We can allow our ego to react and sabotage or we can let our spirit run free in love. We are always in control of our actions.

The challenge has always been that "good people" don't know how to win elections

A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain. Of committing to a course of action.

George Carlin was great right up to the end of his life. But Richard Pryor was probably the best, most gifted stand-up comedian who will ever live.

Good humor, like the jaundice, makes every one of its own complexion.

Twenty years ago rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for IBM.

What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

My love for you isn't just my affair, it's yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don't know.

To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.

I'd hate wearing suits every day.