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I just read 'The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.' To be married 25 years, you have to put as much energy as I put into being an actor or being a great football player into being a better husband and a better father.

I think that enduring, committed love between a married couple, along with raising children, is the most noble act anyone can aspire to. It is not written about very much.

I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.

It had not occurred to me that marriage requires the same effort as a career. And unlike a career, marriage requires a joint effort.

Some of us stay married because we're in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage.

I'm amazed, as quirky, individual and selfish as most of us are, that anyone stays married for long.

You know, I might get married at 50 or 60, when it actually means something to say 'for the rest of my life.'

A lasting marriage, they say, is one where the two reach for different sections of the Sunday paper. Me, I go right for the obituaries, just like those very elderly characters in Muriel Spark's spooky novel, 'Memento Mori.'