“No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.”

In loving life you love what can’t survive.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.

How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn’t have to choose. And I believe that’s always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.

Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.

Because I loved myself, I was loved.

I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?

To be a fool at the right time is also an art.

Let the husband render to his wife the affection owed her, and likewise also the wife to her husband.

I see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?

But now, I am also learning this: we can be mended. We mend each other.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.

With ‘Lady Macbeth,’ I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.