“Often you dont know whether youre the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.”

“Society doesn't officially recognize friendship as an institution in the way it recognizes sexual relationships, so there's no real protocol for ending one. If you've been going out, dating, or jus...”

“When you're a child, your best friend in the world is the kid who lives next door. It doesn't occur to you then that this is a matter of arbitrary circumstance. When you grow up you like to imagine...”

“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. Theres only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each others guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on t...”

“This is one reason people need to believe in Godbecause we want someone to know us, truly, all the way through, even the worst of us.”

“I wish I could recommend the experience of not being killed to everyone.”

“Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.”

“The truth is, people are ravenous for sex, sociopaths for love. I sometimes like to daydream that if we were all somehow simultaneously outed as lechers and perverts and sentimental slobs, it might...”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”