Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.

I learned early in life that to laugh before breakfast was to cry before dinner.

Touch a university with hostile hands and the blood you draw is prompt, copious, and real.

Unrecognized alcoholism is the ruling pathology among writers and intellectuals.

Surely going to bed with a man before marriage was the most courageous act of my life.

There's much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.

The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country.

Where there are children, people become neighbors they don't merely hold property adjacent to one another.

I regard the whole of my life as having been lived in an anxious world.

At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process to keep us at a sanitizing distance from crimes of passion.