“A book is simply the container of an idea like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.”

“A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.”

“Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.”

“Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.”

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

“Hollywood... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.”

“I haven't changed much, over the years. I use less adjectives, now, and have a kinder heart, perhaps.”

“I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.”

“I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.”

“If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?”

“In a secular age, an authentic miracle must purport to be a hoax, in order to gain credit in the world.”

“In the mythic schema of all relations between men and women, man proposes, and woman is disposed of.”

“It is far easier for a woman to lead a blameless life than it is for a man; all she has to do is to avoid sexual intercourse like the plague.”

“It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time.”

“Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”

“Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.”

“Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”

“Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.”

“That is what I'm looking forward to the most, practical learning. I want to be a registered nurse so getting to talk to people who already work in those jobs can really teach me what to expect when I get out in the real world.”

“The bed is now as public as the dinner table and governed by the same rules of formal confrontation.”

“The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.”

“What a joy it is to dance and sing!”

“What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?”

“Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.”

“You must realize that I was suffering from love and I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself.”