For the integrated human being there is no past: there is only the continual transformation of original experience.

Whatever a scientist is doing - reading, cooking, talking, playing - science thoughts are always there at the edge of the mind. They are the way the world is taken in; all that is seen is filtered through an everpresent scientific musing.

Feminism gave me a way to see myself in culture, in society, in history, and that was very important.

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.

Just as once upon a time you could make the experience of religion or nature a great metaphor, so now it is with love. It's just not the kind of thing you can put at the center of a work of literature and have it really reveal us to ourselves.

They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.