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

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

There is this assumption that much of what I write is about my life, and that simply is not true.

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

The old story is true:Women have to be less emotional than men.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.