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.

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.

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.

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

LEXI: I’d settled for this awful existence because I’d convinced myself it was better than being alone....But it’s not.

If a book is not alive in the writer's mind, it is as dead as year-old horse-shit

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace.

No experience in this world has ever been cathartic without the willing participation of the individual. Life does not automatically bestow wisdom or growth upon anyone just for showing up.

If I'm honest I don't think the world would miss me if I never acted again.

If you're too smart it can limit you because you spend so much time thinking that you don't do anything.

As you get older, you recognize the erotic nature of the vampire and the idea of the undead.

I am all for people having their heart in the right place; but the right place for a heart is not inside the head.

Nations need to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, and India's tradition of dissent and democratic debate is a positive aspect.

At the end of the day, if you can't say a line right, it does not matter who your contacts are.