I decided I would never do interviews again.

I work too hard and don't play enough.

You could never predict what would happen. There was an element of destiny in everything that one could never account for.

I wrote because I needed to and wanted to. It never occurred to me that I'd become famous.

Who doesn't need hope in their lives: hope that something can change, that someone cares, that not only bad things happen unexpectedly but good things can happen to us too?

People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like that. And who wants them to? No one wants a woman who looks sick or like she;s been from a refugee camp.

I completed my first novel when I was 19 years old.