“For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.”

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night.

I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.

Having two bathrooms ruined the capacity to co-operate.

In Bali life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one’s own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

The problem with America today is that too many people know too much about not enough.

The assumption that men and woman are essentially alike in all respects, or even in the most important ones, is a damaging one, as damaging as the assumption that they are different in ways in which they aren’t different, perhaps more so.

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.

Of course we need children! Adults need children in their lives to listen to and care for, to keep their imagination fresh and their hearts young and to make the future a reality for which they are willing to work.

The people of one nation alone cannot save their own children; each holds the responsibility for the others’ children.

Motherhood is a biological fact, while fatherhood is a social invention.

Grandparents are given a second chance to enjoy parenthood with fewer of its tribulations and anxieties.

Parents feel like immigrants in the country of the young.

The time has come, I think, when we must recognize bisexuality as a normal form of human behavior.

The atmosphere is the key symbol of global interdependence.

Men have always been afraid that women could get along without them.

Home, I learned, can be anywhere you make it. Home is also the place to which you come back again and again.

Polite conversation is rarely either.

You start reverting back to that state of mind where you’re having conversations with yourself, and that’s where the weirdest and most honest ideas come from.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

Would you like to be a brilliant conversationalist?

It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

You’re in a conversation and everybody’s agreeing with what you’re saying – even if you say something totally crazy. You need people who can tell you what you don’t want to hear.