What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

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.

Without dreams ‘life’remains ‘life’..always: neither better nor worse.

The only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an ... urgent deadline in the offing.

I really want to help write women back into history.

It's impossible to talk without labels. "Dog" is a label, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless, nor does it mean there's no difference in a Shih Tzu and a Doberman.

I lost 100 pounds and embraced theater and music as what I was going to make for the rest of my life.

Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.

Life is too short to make just one decision, Music's too loud for just one station, Love is too big for just one nation, AND GOD IS TOO BIG FOR JUST ONE RELIGION...

You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies literally beyond counting and this is only one universe.

You move just a finger, say the slightest word, something's bound to linger-be heard.

It's only by investing properly in our defense that we can ensure we're properly equipped to face our shared challenges together.