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My reaction to porno films is as follows: After the first ten minutes, I want to go home and screw. After the first twenty minutes, I never want to screw again as long as I live.
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I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps.We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves !
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We all parent the best we can. Being human, we're ambivalent. We want perfection for our babies, but we also need sleep.
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If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
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We all carry the Houses of our Youth inside, and our Parents, too, grown small enough to fit within our Hearts.
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Spring, you are a pinking shears: you cut fresh edges on the world.
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I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?
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I don't think that I had any idea that 'Fear of Flying' would become a part of the culture. I had no idea that it would go all over the world and be published in Chinese and Serbo-Croat and so on.
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Poetry is what we turn to in the most emotional moments of our life - when a beloved friend dies, when a baby is born or when we fall in love.
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A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
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biography is essentially a collaborative art, the latest biographer collaborating with all those who wrote earlier.
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Writers do not choose their subjects; their subjects choose them.
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Each of us only feels the torn lining of his own coat and sees the wholeness of the other person's.
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I know some good marriages-marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
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The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
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The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise.
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Court, in our society, is often the last resort of stubbornness.
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At fifty the madwoman in the attic breaks loose, stomps down the stairs, and sets fire to the house. She won't be imprisoned anymore.
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All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.
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The body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.
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Before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
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When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
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I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It's amazing. They don't see any stigma attached to it. We don't need a man to prove our identity anymore.
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Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.