Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.

Secrecy is never so appealing as in a free society.

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell.

Mormonism is a male religion, a dream of prophets and patriarchs.

I don’t believe man is woman’s natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.

I don't believe man is a woman's natural enemy. Perhaps his lawyer is.

Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate.

Until quite recently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the arts.

The price of shallow sex may be a corresponding loss of capacity for deep love.

Until quite recently dance in America was the ragged Cinderella of the arts . . .

The graceful Georgian streets and squares, a series of steel engravings under a wet sky.

The mark of a true crush... is that you fall in love first and grope for reasons afterward.

I couldn't have made it without knowing how to use laughter to get from one day to the next.

Telephone operators recognize my voice before I give my name, and say, 'Sock it to Kilpatrick.'

A handwritten, personal letter has become a genuine modern-day luxury, like a child's pony ride.

Between the two poles of whole-truth and half-truth is slung the chancy hammock in which we all rock.

When two people marry they become in the eyes of the law one person, and that one person is the husband.

The paradox of Reality is that no image is as compelling as the one which exists only in the mind's eye.

Rumor and gossip, like sound itself, appear to travel by wave-effect, sheer preposterosity being no barrier.

The law changes and flows like water, and the stream of women's rights law has become a sudden rushing torrent.

The law changes and flows like water, and . . . the stream of women's rights law has become a sudden rushing torrent.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

The majority of Utah's citizens do not merely approve the death penalty, they demand it - the state religion demands it.

People say to me now, 'Oh, it must have been so glamorous to grow up in hotels, eat in restaurants.' Of course, we hated it.

Writing about your family is the hardest thing, unless you had the perfect happy family life, which very few of us have had.

the metabolism of a consumer society requires it continually to eat and excrete, every day throwing itself away in plastic bags.

At Gatling-gun tempo word-perfect the first time out. the journalistic equivalent of a high-wire front somersault without a net.

Hair brings one’s self-image into focus; it is vanity’s proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices

Every time I get ready to chuck it, I remind myself that I can accomplish a lot in that little minute, and they remember what I say.

Mind and body are not to be taken lightly. Their connection is intimate and mysterious, and better mapped by poets than pornographers.

Natural villains are hard to come by, what with all the shrinks and social-scientist types threatening to understand everybody into the ground.

Californians tend to be outspoken. When the great migration began, the more timid people must have stayed home, and the bolder ones headed west.

The difficulty with becoming a patient is that as soon as you get horizontal, part of your being yearns, not for a doctor, but for a medicine man.

Faithful horoscope-watching, practiced daily, provides just the sort of small but warm and infinitely reassuring fillip that gets matters off to a spirited start.

In Mormon society and culture, highest values are placed on hard work, thrift, clean living, obedience to the elders and, above all, on the importance of the family.

'60 Minutes' was a disaster for me because it made everybody think that I was the house liberal of CBS, which is the part that I was playing. It was fun for a while.

What troubles me is not that movie stars run for office, but that they find it easy to get elected. It should be difficult. It should be difficult for millionaires, too.

The notion that the great artist requires a great patron has been around since the Pharaohs. That the born patron also needs an artist to patronize is a less-studied phenomenon.

Huge herds of vigorous, curious, open-eyed Americans freely roaming the world are, it seems to me, quite possibly a vital national resource today as at no other time in our history.

Ballet's image of perfection is fashioned amid a milieu of wracked bodies, fevered imaginations, Balkan intrigue and sulfurous hatreds where anything is likely, and dancers know it.

This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. We strain to renew our capacity for wonder to shock ourselves into astonishment once again.

The Mormon belief system unites curiously American pairs of opposites. A relish for the dog-eat-dog practices of the marketplace goes hand in hand with the stern obligation to 'help thy neighbor.'

Rome's riches are in too immediate juxtaposition. Under the lid of awful August heat, one moves dizzily from church to palace to fountain to ruin, a single fly at a banquet, not knowing where to light.

In Utah, the American melting pot is unstirred. Three out of four people are Mormons, and they are all here in this bleakly beautiful sanctuary 'behind the Zion curtain' because of religious persecution.

We are on a sexual binge in this country. ... One consequence of this binge is that while people now get into bed more readily and a lot more naturally than they once did, what happens there often seems less important.

The real trouble with the doctor image in America is that it has been grayed by the image of the doctor-as-businessman, the doctor-as-bureaucrat, the doctor-as-medical-robot, and the doctor-as-terrified-victim-of-malpractice-suits.

Before I ever heard about '60 Minutes,' I had been a writer, a columnist for 'Life' magazine and for 'Newsweek' - that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I'm not a quack-quack TV journalist.

Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.

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