It is fascinating to me that when the lists of the great writers are trotted out year after year, you often find lists without a single woman mentioned.

I myself have perceived women's actions as more aggressive than I would have in men because I too am walking around with my own biases. The way to fight them is to become conscious of them.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

I think that it's important for people to read philosophy and literature is not because I think everyone should be a well-rounded human being, but because it will help you think better about what you are doing.

Good books, written by men or women, are ones in which you lose consciousness of the person writing the sentences.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.