The success occurs in a place outside of me, and doesn't touch me on an intimate level. I live in my own skin, I have not changed greatly, I remain the same woman.

The media could do a much better job, that's for sure, especially the media that targets women... Human rights? They couldn't care less!

far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die.

I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.

fiction happens in the belly, it doesn't happen in the brain.

There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.