It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I don't have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic - if we can call it that - between high and low. Maybe it's because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

All I know about humour is that I don't know anything about it.

But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.

Let's go downtown, " Dad said. "By the public library. You never know what wild and crazy things might be happening at the library.

God made the country and man made the town.

Well, I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor.

Wise men learn by others' harms, fools scarcely by their own.

And make sure you tell daddy That I'm still his little girl Yeah I still feel like I'm where I'm supposed to be But don't forget to remember me

The secret to success: find something you love to do so much, you can’t wait for the sun to rise to do it all over again.

I think that we, as monkeys, want to live in smaller groups. It's very scary when we're all - as wonderful as it is - connected.

Nothing depends upon the death of an individual, be he ever so great, but much depends upon the freedom of India.