"Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody."

"Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them."

"What a joy it is to dance and sing!"

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

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

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

"To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"A day without an argument is like an egg without salt."

"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."

"Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe."

"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."

"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."

"Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death."

"My mother learned that she was carrying me at about the same time the Second World War was declared; with the family talent for magic realism, she once told me she had been to the doctor's on the very day."

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

"It is, perhaps, better to be valued as an object of passion than never to be valued at all."

"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."

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

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

"Pornography is a satire on human pretensions."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."