Never joke with the press. Irony does not translate into newsprint.
Each artist or writer who works in Venice comes to believe that the city yields its most special secret to him or her alone.
Poetry is the inner life of a culture, its nervous system, its deepest way of imagining the world. A culture that ignores its poets, chokes off its nervous system and becomes mortally ill.
You have to enjoy being a woman. Why should being a woman be such a negative thing where you always have to improve yourself? I have never in my entire life met a man who didn’t want to go to bed with me because I was too fat.
You don’t get to choose what you get famous for and you don’t get to control which of your life’s many struggles gets to stand for you.
I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
I don’t necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I’m trying to finish.
All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean – then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
My generation had Doris Day as a role model, then Gloria Steinem – then Princess Diana. We are the most confused generation.
Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.
I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
Home is where your books are.
I prefer to work in the morning. I get up now at five in the morning. In the morning is when I feel freshest.
Being a daughter is only half the equation; bearing one is the other.
Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.
Despite all the cynical things writers have said about writing for money, the truth is we write for love. That is why it is so easy to exploit us.
People in the land of LaLa look like expensive wax fruit. And they work hard to achieve that look.
Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.
If we are all made of God, it is our friends who remind us. We pass the gift of God to them. They pass it back to us when we need it most.