As a girl - twelve, thirteen years old - I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them.

I remember everything but forgive anyway.

Did your great-grandfather have any children?

I think the best thing your parents can do for you is to let you be yourself.

It ( In My Life ) was the first song that I wrote that was really, consciously about my life.... up until then, it had been all glib and throwaway.

Emotion. Passion. Ideas. Simplicity. These are the big things that big business needs from its creative agencies. No one else is going to provide these essential elements for business.

Accidental stacks considered harmful.

I will never eat fish eyeballs, and I do not want to taste anything commonly kept as a house pet, but otherwise I am a cinch to feed.

Getting into music has changed my personality and way of doing things. I'm far more open now.

In a military operation, the command and control elements are a legitimate target.