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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

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

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

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

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.

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

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.

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.

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

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

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.

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.

Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure.

Reading a book is like re writing it for yourself.

Spindly branches of buttercups were secreted among gleaming stems still moist at the roots from last nights rain that had washedand refreshed the entire wood had dowered it in poignant transparency the unique inconsolable quality of rainy countries as if all was glimpsed through tears.

Despair is the constant companion of the clown.

The clown may be the source of mirth but who shall make the clown laugh

Marianne had sharp cold eyes and she was spiteful but her father loved her.

The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.

Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

The kind of power mothers have is enormous.

But you have no silver linings without a cloud.

When he was twenty-three or twenty-four my father began to learn German and read philosophy in his spare hours, which did not look as though he were destined to remain long on board ship!

My father was often angry when I was most like him.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.