Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.

Why is the measure of love loss?

Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

Where you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.

Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Unconditional love is what a child should expect from a parent even though it rarely works out that way.

And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband’s arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe.

It's God's world. He washes you clean. He makes you whole. He puts rain in your garden and sunshine in your heart. "Clarence

She had been carried away by the need to defend herself.

It's our moral obligation, as well as, I believe, it is the government's obligation to take care of its people.

I love, love, love just being hands on at all times in the studio.

None can do a man so much harm as he doeth himself.

If you're from a poor background, you have to work even harder. But that's what makes you who you are.

They said pret-a-porter will kill your name, and it saved me

People need their history like they need air and food.

I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling