You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.

Little children are all writers.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction.

The heads of strong old age are beautiful / Beyond all grace of youth

I'm a working mom, not a professional athlete, but I am a runner and that's a special club.

For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.

Babies are not brought by storks and poets are not produced by workshops.

The Auteurs have become Luke Haines. I ate their bodies, spat out the pips, and sucked up their souls.

You can be happy in any circumstances, you simply need to believe in God.

Without the existence of the opposite, the concept has no meaning.

When you live for the fight, for the blood, the relationships you form are tenuous and easily broken.

When photography was invented, it was thought to be an equivalent to truth. It was truth with a capital T.