I try to keep my voice in writing, and I think that's why I get so many complaints about how I write.

The achievement of happiness requires not the satisfaction of our needs but the examination and transformation of those needs.

I know how to give the meaning of a word but not how to give the intention of a word.

One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.

I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear.

Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.

Philosophy is the education of grown-ups.

(Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)

Leadership is the day to day communications about the real issues.

Self-expression has to come out pure. It has to have an environment waiting for it. It has to have a garden it can plant itself in.

I mean, I don’t want to pass judgment—I just wish my husband didn’t shoot deer.”“Oh, Mel, don’t worry. I’ve been hunting with your husband—the deer are completely safe.

He told me that when we first met, he had said to a friend about me: “If I get that girl’s number I will never ask another girl for her number again.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather are metaphors.

Treat all men alike. Give them the same law. Give them an even chance to live and grow.

When I do not walk in the clouds I walk as though I were lost.

I was never geeky about anything.

And we owe science to the combined energies of individual men of genius, rather than to any tendency to progress inherent in civilization.

Probably a few weeks after I was born I started having casts put on my legs to straighten them out. After that corrective shoes and with a brace in between.