You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

I hate Iran. I hate the Iranian government. It's a cruel and evil government.

They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now.

There's an unconscious bias in our society: girls are wonderful; boys are terrible. And to be a boy, or young man, growing up, having to listen to all this, it must be painful.

Men are restless, adventurous. Women are conservative - despite what current ideology says.

I think I am at the end of a certain phase of my life. What I'm on the lookout for now is the unexpected, for things that come from outside and that I never thought might happen. Sometimes you have to watch for them so you don't automatically say no to the new, simply because you're in the habit of saying no to everything that comes along. I'm constantly changing my perspective on my own life. I see the past differently, and that's a wonderful thing.

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.