Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.

If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength - in search of my mother's garden, I found my own.

If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.

Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same, there's a real lightheartednes s about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.