Quotes from Shana Alexander

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

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

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

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

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.

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.

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

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

'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.

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

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

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.

Secrecy is never so appealing as in a free society.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I have been active as a writer and journalist for nearly forty years. But the number of great reporters I have run across in that time would make, as they say, a slim book. Without question, the top man on my list would be Tommy Thompson.

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

Letters are expectation packaged in an envelope.

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

We strain to renew our capacity for wonder, to shock ourselves into astonishment once again.

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.