How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it.

You can't reduce an actual human being; you're just writing! You're not doing anything to another person.

They say writers sell everybody out. What can you do? You know only the people you know.

Of course love is a force in life. People will go on falling in love forever. And more important, sexual infatuation will enrapture everyone. Otherwise, no babies!

I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.

A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. 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.

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.