What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

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.

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.

The aesthetic and the agonistic are one, according to the ancient Greeks.

We could fly anywhere in the world given that we had to fly coach but we could fly anywhere in the world or do whatever we wanted to do.

The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious.

If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.

I am amused to see from my window here how busily a man has divided and staked off his domain. God must smile at his puny fences running hither and thither everywhere over the land.

Advice is not a gift, but a debt that the old owe to the young.

Give me but a little cheerful company, let me only have the company of the people I love, let me only be where I like and with whom I like, and the devil may take the rest, say I.

Everybody likes to win. I don't care if you work for a small plumbing company or the most successful company in the world. There's a special flavor to winning.

Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function; living is the functionary.

I can't concentrate in flats. I could go to the gym if I wore flats, I'd love to go to the gym, but I just can't get my head around the footwear.