We are supposed to value originality, but the truth is we want to be like each other. We even want our differences to be the same differences.

The foreigner, the stranger, he too must learn to make a forgery of himself. He must imitate the host culture.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations.

who were happiest when a dog quoted a line of poetry.

Freud was intrigued by how in dreams it was his patients most invested in appearing to be rational

I did not know it then, but I would go on to write three books in that shed, including the one you are reading now. It was there that I would begin to write in the first person, using an I that is close to myself and yet is not myself.

writing was one of the few activities in which I could handle the anxiety of uncertainty, of not knowing what was going to happen next.

To my eyes, the particular quality of their attention as they calmly shaped the forms they were inventing gave them beauty without measure.

Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.