I think the spirit survives when we die, and nothing is wasted in nature and just as our material body disintegrates and becomes something else in the soil. The spirit becomes something else, reunites with a spiritual force that is out there in the universe. Not as individuals but as part of this spirituality.

Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.

If you change the way you tell your own story, you can change the colour and create a life in technicolour.

The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.

My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.

At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.