A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

All my forebears worked for a living. My grandfather painted portraits. My mother too. My aunt painted seascapes.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

Love is serene and calm

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

Birth is the start of loneliness and loneliness the start of poetry.

Souls have neither Sex nor Colour.