To do science today is to experience a dimension unique in contemporary working lives; the work promises something incomparable: the sense of living both personally and historically. That is why science now draws to itself all kinds of people - charlatans, mediocrities, geniuses - everyone who wants to touch the flame, feel alive to the time.

... the whole sickening trickery in life -- the idea that one cannot fight for one's humanity without, ironically, losing it ... that trickery is the real enemy and the very essence of the thing we must continually be on our guard against.

The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom-or rather the movement toward it-that counts.

That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

The desire for narration keeps on reasserting itself, so that since modernism and fiction brought narration to an end, it is sought in memoirs.

I may cause someone to feel badly, not because I'm doing something to them, but because the way in which I see might cause pain. But I am not doing the hurting.

We all grew up so utterly vulnerable, enthralled by romantic love as we knew it. First of all, it was pounded into you every which way that you've got to get married and you've got to have babies. That you're not a natural woman if you don't. So that led to a lot of sitting by the telephone and waiting for a call. And that led you into a culture in which you were always in a subordinate position without realizing it; hamstrung, not able to take action. That was the most important thing: you were always waiting to be desired.