Humanity has this need to hear stories because they connect us with other people, they teach us about our own feelings. We feel less lonely when we see other people going through the same things, even if they’re fictional characters.
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them.
I’m very optimistic because I think that the real strength of a nation like the United States comes from blending cultures. There’s no way that you can close the frontiers anywhere. The borders are there to be violated permanently.
We are too connected. There’s noise in our heads all the time.
Aphrodite is about lust and gluttony – the only two sins worth committing, in my opinion.
Cooking can be like foreplay.
The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.
Writing is my job. I don’t think of it as art.
Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.
I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.
My father says that fear is good; it’s the body’s alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can’t be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid.
At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day’s gone and I don’t even know what I’ve done with the hours.
Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.
Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.
Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men.
I’m surrounded by the scene of aging. I myself am in my 70s and not getting any younger. Although I’m very healthy, and I have a lot of energy, and I still feel 50, I’m over 70 and I understand that I am preparing for later.
When my daughter Paula died, I was in the deepest pain, and my mother said, “This kind of sorrow is like a long, narrow, dark channel. You have to walk this channel alone and be sure that there is light at the other ending. Just keep walking.”
I was born in the middle of World War II, the middle of the Holocaust; I was born when there was no declaration of human rights, when feminism was not an issue, when children were working in factories. I mean, today’s world is a better place!
What happens in the world affects me. Sometimes, that’s part of the writing.
At my age, people prefer to stay in a relationship that is not working. I do not understand that. I think it takes a lot of courage to separate. But it takes more energy to stay in something that is not working.