I believe in not quite knowing. A writer needs to be doubtful, questioning. I write out of curiosity and bewilderment.

I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

Memories can be everything if we choose to make them so. But you are right: you mustn't do that. That is for me, and I shall do it.

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.

Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.

People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

He traveled in order to come home.

I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

If the landscape of human emotion were to exist in country, it would be in Italy." ~Lisa Fantino/Amalfi Blue

We are really battling, today in the U.S., keeping science education in the forefront at the elementary level, and that's where the research shows that kids get interested.

There were no ill language, if it were not ill taken.

Experience is a great advantage. The problem is that when you get the experience, you're too damned old to do anything about it.

Trail dust is thicker'n blood.

Greece isn't a democracy now it's run through a troika - three foreign officials that fly into Athens airport and tell the Greeks what they can and can't do.

I will not allow anyone to take anything off my palette but if I do then within that, I can be creative.

What is reason now was passion heretofore.

For official purposes, these children do not exist.

You can't be scared to die for the truth. The truth is the only thing that is ever going to be constant.