fiction is necessary to life - not only as books but as dreams, dreams that frame the world and give it meaning.

I was happy without having sought happiness.

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.

No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.

What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.

It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.

We are defined as artists by the pull of our hearts, not the creation of our hands.

Time reveals the truth.

There is no greater hiding place for a secret than within the mind of a madman.

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

Never explain, never retract, never apologize. Just get the thing done and let them howl.

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

No matter how many luxuries you get, something will be missing. No matter how carefully you choose, you'll never be totally happy.

It doesn’t matter how strong or capable you are; if you don’t have a big heart, you will not succeed.

A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.

Be kind to yourself, dear - to our innocent follies. Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance. You will come to see that all evolves us.