A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at 'the truth' than a factual record.

My mother was a woman who was very frustrated. She had a great deal of ability, and all this energy went into me and my brother.

The human community is evolving... . We can survive anything you care to mention. We are supremely equipped to survive, to adapt and even in the long run to start thinking.

We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.

She was thirty-nine. No, she did not envy her eighteen-year- old self at all. But she did envy, envied every day more bitterly, that young girl's genuine independence, largeness, scope, and courage.