It’s hard to feel attracted to someone who has abandoned her sense of autonomy.

If you start to feel that you have given up too many parts of yourself to be with your partner, then one day you will end up looking for another person in order to reconnect with those lost parts.

Love enjoys knowing everything about you; desire needs mystery.

Trouble looms when monogamy is no longer a free expression of loyalty but a form of enforced compliance.

Mystery is not always about travelling to new places, it is about looking with new eyes.

Love is a vessel that contains both security and adventure, and commitment offers one of the great luxuries of life: time. Marriage is not the end of romance, it is the beginning.

There is no neediness in desire ... there is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving, [but] it's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.

When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner we're turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.

Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.

It's our imagination that's responsible for love, not the other person.

The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.

If you're not aiming at perfection, you're not trying hard enough.

To live a little, love a little. To live a lot, love a lot.

You would compliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would not praise an angel.

I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.

I'm the worst in The Office. It's a problem. They've had to shut down the set for like 30 minutes because of me.

Who wins a... competition [between two traits] is massively context sensitive.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

When we finished the tour we had been writing together for a year. We moved forward from there and have just now finished our record. We're having a new record out in the Spring.

For a man with an education the world is a wide place and the opportunities are many