The success occurs in a place outside of me, and doesn’t touch me on an intimate level. I live in my own skin, I have not changed greatly, I remain the same woman.
Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don’t know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.
I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I’m writing post-colonial literature. I don’t know what I’m writing. That’s the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that’s it.
It’s going to go away because we all need silence. We all need time to reflect and think. I am not at all pessimistic about this.
I should say that I’m not conscious of any particular style or any particular literary device when I am writing. I have written 22 books, and they are all very different. I have tried all kinds of genres.
I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don’t know; everything that can possibly happen.
In my lifetime, the world has become better, not worse. And the world is moving, very slowly but surely with more democracy and more liberal way of thinking, more inclusion and more diversity.
We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.
My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it’s not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.
Americans have a warrior’s mentality, most of them. That’s how this society was built. The fact that you own a gun and shoot to defend your life is a very American way of thinking.
My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.
The world starts to exist, for Americans, when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place. And it exists for three weeks and then it disappears into thin air.
The world is a very unjust, unfair place and we have to live with that. Historically, there is impunity for most crimes.
And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It’s important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.
I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.
The connection that I have with my readers makes me very happy, and gives meaning to the strange profession of writing.
I think I was a feminist before the word was invented.
The hardest thing in love is to let go.
The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country.
She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.