Depression is when you think there's nothing to be done. Fortunately I always think there's something to be done.

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 think because mothers usually are the people who take care of us when we're little, and when we're little those mothers are omnipotent, perhaps men even more than women don't like to think about that dependency. That dependency is horror.

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.

We lose ourselves in stories; that's the beauty of literary art.

Intellectual curiosity about one's own illness is certainly born of a desire for mastery. If I couldn't cure myself, perhaps I could at least begin to understand myself.

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