Writing is my job. I don’t think of it as art.
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.
More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn’t be published. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories.
I’m open to love, and I think that I will fall in love with a wonderful man.
People are afraid of falling in love because they don’t want to suffer.
I would like to be with my husband together sitting somewhere in a lonely place in the woods and take something, maybe some pills or something, a magic potion and die together.
Life is very mysterious and there are many things we don’t know. And there are elements of magic realism in every culture, everywhere. It’s just accepting that we don’t know everything and everything is possible.
I don’t think that we have to look like the models in the magazines because they are 19 year olds and they have been photo shopped extensively, not but given what I, we have as the raw material, take care of it.
I’m such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how.
Dying is not easy. It’s a very hard transition.