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

To recommend that women become identical to men, would be simple reversal, and would defeat the whole point of androgyny, and for that matter, feminism: in both, the whole point is choice.

Ideas move fast when their time comes.

Normal is absolutely my least favorite word.

Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion, both because it is powerless to act in the real world, and because it glides so easily into hatred and resentment against those who have taken our Eden from us.

That is the point of quotations. One can use another's words to be insulting.

I don't know why togetherness was ever held up as an ideal of marriage. Away from home for both, then together, that's much better.

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.

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

The compulsion to find a lover and husband in a single person has doomed more women to misery than any other illusion.

Most full lives are filled with empty gestures.

He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him.

Giving evidence against one's employers was the first step to unemployment.

The aristocracy in the future is not one of wealth or university education, but the aristocracy of the men who have done something for themselves and their fellow men.

Turkey is widely envied while there are very serious troubles in the world economy.

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.

Jokes are better than war. Even the most aggressive jokes are better than the least aggressive wars. Even the longest jokes are better than the shortest wars.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

I have never met an old saint who regretted having spent too much time in prayer, but I have met many who regretted having spent too little!

Beauty is the vocation bestowed on the artist by the Creator in the gift of artistic talent.

It becomes part of a person's second nature; he belongs to the church, like he belongs to his family, and he does not quit his family because someone in it turns out to be a rascal.