When I work I feel more alive than under any other circumstances. There's not an 'I love you' in the world that can match it. I feel safe, excited, at peace, erotic, centered. Nothing can touch me.

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.

Well, yeah, you listen to a talking snake and there's gonna be trouble.

It is only just that anything that grows up on its own should feel it has nothing to repay for an upbringing which it owes no one.

The laws of physics and chemistry must be the same in a crucible as in the larger laboratory of Nature.

Mum wasn't at all religious, but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.

There are but few proverbial sayings that are not true, for they are all drawn from experience itself, which is the mother of all sciences.

I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God's and everything in it.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

So far be distant; and good night, sweet friend: thy love ne'er alter, till they sweet life end

When people think, rightly or wrongly, that marriage is forever, they are stimulated to seek and find a resolution, a modus vivendi, whenever they quarrel.