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

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?

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

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.

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 all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.

Dance from the heart and let your passion shine through

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...

Religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple & enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it & hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do.

Beasts kill for hunger, men for pay.

If the culture is so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, how are you making genuine choices?

It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.

You must look for the good in people to have more of it appear. As you look only for the good things in a person, you will be amazed at what your new focus reveals.

As a novelist, I ask of myself only that I tell the truth and that I tell it beautifully.

You want to surround yourself with people who are as dedicated to their discipline as you are to yours and let them do what they do.