Men generally do not see women as competition.

Many writers over the centuries simply do not have the reputations they deserve because they were female, and that is an act of suppression.

After years of having immersed myself in science, I do think that if you master several different ways of thinking, it makes your own thought processes more agile.

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.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

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.

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