for me, the beauty of feminism is that it is a social and political movement that has redefined the power and obligation of the self: self-possession and self-regulation as a tool for social reform.

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 didn’t believe in tomorrow. We we couldn’t forget what had happened yesterday.

Too often, many people choose goals that are not inspiring and empowering to them

Look, people have an image of Italians. When I go somewhere in the world, I don't care where it is, when they look at me it's not about my intelligence. It's who can I beat up.

I don't bow down to the federal government.

I always have a Sharpie, because usually when someone asks me for an autograph, they don't have a pen. I carry one in my purse, as well as in my tennis bag.

I refuse to be typecast, and I'll have a go at anything so long as it's different, challenging, hard work and demands great versatility.

Most people do not understand until old age what Plato tells them when they are young.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

There are a lot of very brilliant people who believe that the nation-state is fast becoming a relic of the past.

We should think of the church as an orchestra in which the different churches play on different instruments while a Divine Conductor calls the tune.