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" It's hard to penetrate characters who are very cut off and lack empathy and to do it with sympathy. It's so easy to make a damaged character repugnant. "

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" Many scholars working in the humanities have already shown interest in brain research. For years, contemporary theory in the humanities has left the body and biology out of their discussions. "

" Although sometimes the morbid is also the transcendent, the transcendent cannot be reduced to the morbid. "

" Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science departments. "

" Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.' "

" I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980. "

" My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy. "

" We sometimes imagine we want what we don't really want. "

" When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from. "

" There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me. "

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

" I've come to understand that migraine is a part of the personality. I have migraine troughs. These often follow high productivity. I have a hypo-manic phase, then I'll crash. "

" I watched 'Holiday' in college, and that was when I had my first fantasy of being Katharine Hepburn, standing at the top of the staircase in a huge Hollywood mansion. "

" In August of 2002, I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself - only its aftermath. "

" I am married to a writer, and this - writing - is an odd enterprise. It's something we both support very strongly. "

" I am always suspicious of those who impose 'rules' on child rearing. Every child is different in terms of temperament and learning, and every parent responds to a particular child, not some generalized infant or youngster. "

" Being a mother is complicated because it's not just a paternal culture making demands on you; it's those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated. "

" Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective. "

" Hysteria is something that I've been interested for a very long time. I thought I might have it, but it seems that it's unlikely. "

" I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive. "

" Every mental state is also physical. "

" The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them. "

" With almost no exceptions, art by men is much more expensive than art by women. Even great women artists, like Louise Bourgeois and Lee Krasner, are only fully embraced very late in their career. "

" Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing. "

" While reading 'David Copperfield' in the middle of the night - probably because of the light, I had insomnia for the first time - I looked out of the window and thought, 'If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do.' "

" I have a longstanding fascination with visual art. I do, in fact, draw as well, as I did in 'The Summer without Men.' I also write essays about visual art. "

" The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family. "

" I enjoy domestic life. Cooking gives me great pleasure, especially if I can chop vegetables slowly and think about what I'm doing and dream a little about this and that. "

" It's not as if I've been unlucky. My books have been published and reviewed. I haven't lived through terrible literary suffering! "

" The third-person or 'objective,' static, reductive models used in most science are important and yield significant results, but they have their limitations. "

" None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world. "