Art is long, and Time is fleeting.
Many books in popular psychology are a melange of the author's comments, a dollop of research, and stupefyingly dull transcriptions from interviews.
Of course, if you photograph the behavior of women and men at a particular time in history, in a particular situation, you will capture differences. But the error lies in inferring that a snapshot is a lasting picture. What women and men do at a moment in time tells us nothing about what women and men are in some unvarying sense - or about what they can be.
No one seems to have learned, or can remember, the magic words that calm people when they are frightened or threatened: "I'm sorry; I didn't see you; are you all right?" The inability to speak these words, I observe, goes right along with a propensity for mindless insults.
History is written by the victors, but it's victims who write the memoirs.
The scientific method is designed to help investigators overcome the most entrenched human cognitive habit: the confirmation bias, the tendency to notice and remember evidence that confirms our beliefs or decisions, and to ignore, dismiss, or forget evidence that is discrepant. That's why we are all inclined to stick to a hypothesis we believe in. Science is one way of forcing us, kicking and screaming if necessary, to modify our views.
In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth.
All my characters are me. I'm not a good enough actor to become a character. I hear about actors who become the role and I think 'I wonder what that feels like. ' Because for me, they're all me.
There's a lot of days where you feel forgotten.
The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.
This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.