A girl is like a young tree, she said. You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away.

Sometimes you change to survive, and some things you don't give up, or you're too prideful, and then you think well, what's pride? Is it a good thing? Maybe it's a bad thing. That's what I look at in my life. It's always a question in my life I look at, and I never find the answer, because if I did, probably I wouldn't have books to write.

And after I played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

I am like a falling star who has finally found her place next to another in a lovely constellation, where we will sparkle in the heavens forever.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.