All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars.

Love, like a sense of humor, is now claimed by everyone even though Love, like a sense of humor, is rather more rare than not, and to most of us poor muddlers unbearable at full strength.

It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

Actually there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. Those sexual acts are entirely natural; if they were not, no one would perform them.

Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both.

World events are the work of individuals whose motives are often frivolous, even casual.

Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.

[T]he family in the West is finished.... its origin was economic, not biological.... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another’s jagged edges.