“Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle.”

“Women may be vain, but when a man is vain, it is beyond believing, for a man is willing to die for his vanity.”

“Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.”

“Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.”

“Try not to live in a linguistic slum.”

“One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But One can use the work to interpret the life.”