I don't know if memoirs can produce literary work of the first order. But I do know that novels are doing it only rarely.

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.

I am often appalled by those who make history, but inspired by those who do not.” -Morgana le Fey/Morgana Cornwall

Adults tend to think they have much free will. Kids younger than six are less sure. They may be more realistic!

Every moment is a moment. Every moment makes a certain request of us. The question is how we answer it.

Oh, America is slipping away from the rest of the consciousness of the planet - slipping away.

Religion's voice has been taken away. It was taken away by Lyndon Johnson in the 1970s because of a dispute he had, I think, with the church. And this was his way of silencing the church.

What would a Frey know of honor? - Sir Davos Seaworth

If you are resentful, you keep the thing alive. So the way to go on is to get rid of it, in order to forgive in order to forget.

Back when the country was strong, back before Elvis and before the Vietnam war came along.

My male colleagues sometimes wonder if I understand as much about defense as I ought to. Of course if I agree with them, they think that I do.

Persistent kindness conquers the ill-disposed.