They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

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.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Taking care of your body is insurance for your soul.

I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.

Blue screen of death: she'd crashed his system. Oh, well. Boys were so unstable that way, full of buggy, self-contradictory code, pathetically unoptimized.

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

I am determined to write daily.

I got into university to study graphic design, and I got into drama school as well, so I had the choice whether I wanted to go down the sensible route or if I wanted to become an actor.

I'm a huge horror movie fan. Beyond belief.

I'm glad now, at age 66, that I never used alcohol or tobacco... I've buried a lot of friends who used tobacco or alcohol.

If a shameless woman expects to be defiled and then dies of her fierce love because you do not consent, will chastity also be homicide?