A winter without snow seems depressing, lacking.

Friendship is a form of love. In fact, you don't know how it starts or why. It is subject to the caprices of time. It can grow or die without a reason. It can last a lifetime.

Above all else she mustn't think that using her body will help her attain her goal. Men use women who play seductively, and then they look down on them.

I dream of continuing to dream.

The waves have the habit of going forward and then flowing back.

The future is created through memory.

One writes what one lives, even if not in a literal way. Someone who has gone through an unhappy love tends to describe unhappy loves, even if they have nothing to do with their own.

Falling in love with a story is like falling in love with a person. It tends to occupy your life, your thoughts. You can't do anything else for a long time.

I don't always understand my characters. I write to understand them better.

To leave a book is like leaving the better part of oneself.

Something struck me in Africa, in black Africa, where polygamy is legal: the solitary woman is the rule there, from at an extremely young age, and the children are always the mother's responsibility.

The walls in my room know your name. They heard me sigh your name last night!

Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.

I tend to resist invitations to interpret my own fiction.

How do you know your Colossus is the genuine article in the first place? I read his mind. I matched his DNA. I smelled him. I also did that.

We're trying to divide groups or decide that some of them are truly victims and some of them are truly aggressors.

Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures.

Investing in yourself is the best thing you can do. If you've got talents, no one can take them from you.

I shall seeThe hour of death draw near to me,Hope, blossoming within my heart. . . .