You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

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.

We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.

In the service of the people we followed such a policy that socialism would not lose its human face.

No matter what you think-life goes on and the world still turns and the universe has its own story. The most we can do is plan anyway, but understand, be humbled by things greater than ourselves.

Unfortunately, I have to follow the law.

Funniest thing happened though, you wouldn't believe it, ha, the mannequins came to life. I went insane.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

My homies used to call me ' ions,' and at the time I didn't have no millions, so I ain't really want to be called 'Millions,' so I just shortened it down to . ' i,' my friends used to call me.

Over the years, I developed a theory about why writers are such procrastinators: We were too good in English class. This sounds crazy, but hear me out.

I think the idea of family and protecting the family is something that ties a lot of these women together.

Live every week like it's shark week.