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.

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.

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

In a moment of sheer terror, I realized I couldn't feel my brain. It was there just a minute ago. Maybe I really was dead. "Do I look dead to you?

In this insane, chaotic world, you can only be insane and chaotic.

My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.

What's up, I'm DJ Danger. Some people might think it's dangerous to have an unbrella inside, but i am dangerous!

People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters.

[About Paz De La Huerta....] And there is this girl in the audience and she's gorgeous I can only kind of see her silhouette and she's getting like her t*ts out and I'm like: God, that's unusual.

I can never forgive God for having invented the French

When you're told as a caddie we need to take a break, you're fired.

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

Be what it is that you are seeking.