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

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.

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.

Everyone longs for expressiveness. That's why love carries so much weight. Because so many lives are without other means of expressiveness.

Families are so beautiful. Wherever we may be, looking at kids and happy families make us feel like home.

It's not God who doesn't care, it's us

I'll get cast occasionally as sort of the jerk version of myself, and I have fun doing that. But it's really better for everyone if I stay behind the camera.

Time waxing old can many a lesson teach.

As the world community develops in peace, it will open up great untapped reservoirs in human nature.

Putting on the spectacles of science in expectation of finding an answer to everything looked at signifies inner blindness.

When Rick Perry was told about Kim Jong Il, he said, 'I never heard of him, but then again, I don't listen to that rap.'

When you find peace within, you also find that you can do without. This means simply that you no longer need the things of your outside world, and not needing is a great freedom.

The best religion the world has ever known is the religion of the Bible. It builds up all that is good.

My music is made for the people who are willing to stand up to change this world themselves.