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.

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.

What Independence Has Come to Mean to Me: The Pain of Solitude. The Pleasure of Self-Knowledge

in New York there's such diversity that there's no one central identity; everyone is marginal.

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

Research is the live heart of the scientific life ... Greatness of position, respect for past accomplishments, the Nobel Prize itself -- none of these can compensate for the loss of vitality only research provides.

Emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. It's a relationship like any other.