Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.

Papa's love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety.

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply unfaithful to constancy. I do believe that.

Love can't be a metaphor anymore. If you try to make literature out of it, it doesn't work.

Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.

Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one.

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence, nothing feels as good.

When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

The moment your dreams and your revelation take a special direction while your plans and actions take the opposite direction you commit yourself into a tight box for failure!

We must resist impulses to attack people, their credibility or their nature, and focus only on sharing our own positive creations, contributions, ideas and solutions.

Simplicity is the first cousin of contentment.

No matter what is happening in the world of appearances, beyond the veil of illusion there is love and only Love.

I'm just a simple kid from Brooklyn who landed into the most enchanted lifestyle imaginable.

Our Lord said. Be yourself with the good Lord.

And as long as people want to hear me sing, I don't know why I'd retire.

Titles are but nicknames, and every nickname is a title. The thing is perfectly harmless in itself, but it marks a sort of foppery in the human character, which degrades it.

I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge.