Here's to another year and let's hope it's above ground.

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

It's hard work being a person, you have to do it every single day.

So this is where the years of maturity deliver us - to this needy, selfish, unwieldy wish to be somebody else's first and primal other.

I couldn't have been a novelist without being a mother. It gives you a unique witness point of the growth of a personality. It was a kind of biological component for me that had to come first. My children gave this other window on the world.

In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.

The silence is perfect, and yet a torment.