The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

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.

You story must be best told by you. Your experience is a sacred life.

I certainly supported a woman's right to choose, but to my mind the time to choose was before, not after the fact.

Ender didn't like fighting. He didn't like Peter's kind, the strong against the weak, and he didn't like his own kind either, the smart against the stupid.

Don't Let them fool you or even try to school you

[People] are tired of looking at what happens, they are tired of us having our... let's say finest and brightest not being involved in the most important decisions, and being someplace else.

Those who love to be feared, fear to be loved. Some fear them, but they fear everyone.

If we build three million new houses by 2020, where will we grow all the stuff needed to feed the people who live in them?

I want an identity outside of my work.

Indian president does not determine policy. Here President is not the policy maker. In the name of the president, the cabinet takes the policy decision.

As her father had so often said... Laugh as much as you breathe and love as long as you live.