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

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.

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

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.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.