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.

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

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.

The grief of widowhood, of losing a husband and only to be harassed by his brothers, remained pressed on her.

People don't hurt what they love.

I love being on the road, I love playing.

Something about glamour interested me. All my schoolbooks had drawings of women on terraces with a cocktail and a cigarette.

Canadian hockey players always find a way to get along.

I'm always determined that as a novelist I'm going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

Salvakalpa samadhi is a tremendous acceptance and liberation, but it is not complete absorption in nirvana, in that consciousness.

I've had no sexual education, but I have six children.

I love entertaining and doing Martha Stewart stuff.

Finland is a rich country. What have they got? They got Nokia phones and plywood. How'd they get so rich? Because they're free.