That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

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

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

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

Human beings are repetitive animals. All meaning is generated through repetition.

No matter how brilliant or accomplished they are, there is something emasculating for men in being pitted against a woman. It is even more true in creative fields already considered to be "squishy" and feminine, and it's a big problem because great women have been left off the record.

Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.