Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons,...

The style of flirtation specific to classrooms was of service to the students all their lives.

Do you realize how angry you sound?” must be one of the most infuriating questions in the language.

The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity,...

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That “writers write” is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers...

he writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb...

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you’re over. You’ve caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night....

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your...

In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Fear… is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

The pressures were wrong. There was just enough money and not enough time.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Self-pity” is just sadness, I think, in the pejorative.