Madness is always fascinating, for it reveals the ungluing we all secretly fear: the mind taking off from the body, the possibility that the magnet that attaches us to a context in the world can lose its grip.

American eroticism has always been of a different provenance and complexion than the European variety, an enjoyment both furtive and bland that is closer to a blushing cartoon than a sensual celebration.

As so often happens in marriage, roles that had begun almost playfully, to give line and shape to our lives, had hardened like suits of armor and taken us prisoner.

The thought that we are enduring the unendurable is one of the things that keeps us going.

Hospitals, like airports and supermarkets, only pretend to be open nights and weekends.

Movies both reflect and create social conditions, but their special charm is to offer fantasy clothes as virtual reality, a world where people consume without the tedium of labor. Characters float in a world where the bill never comes due ... and we wonder why we're a debtor nation!

Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.

There are two cinemas: the films we have actually seen and the memories we have of them.

The Internet is democracy's revenge on democracy.

One of the attributes of love . . . is to bring harmony and order out of chaos.

For a woman there is nothing more erotic than being understood.

Being alone and liking it is, for a woman, an act of treachery, an infidelity far more threatening than adultery.

I would trade many an art-film classic for the final exchange between Redford and Streisand in front of the Plaza.

...(Charles) Reich discredits reason because it has been used to justify the war in Vietnam, which is like deciding that because your mother has cooked you a few bad meals you must never eat again.