What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

Food culture in the United States has long been cast as the property of a privileged class. It is nothing of the kind. Culture is the property of a species.

the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important.

Will you explain to me why people encourage delusional behaviour in children, and medicate it in adults?

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

Given my own circumstances, I find that anything can turn out to belong nearly anywhere.

Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue. To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democrac and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.