When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.