One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

I am not an academic who happens to have written a novel. I am a novelist who happens to be quite good academically.

The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.

A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.

You did not so much mind being -conventionally- betrayed, if you were not kept in the dark, which was humiliating, or defined only as a wife and dependent person, which was annihilating.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.