Love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way.

I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.

People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

His lifetime was less than a fraction of a second in infinity. Or maybe he did not even exist; maybe human beings, the planets, everything in Creation were a dream...an illusion. He smiled with humility when he remembered.

Young women don't want to be called feminists because it's not sexy and ah they think that their mothers and grandmothers have achieved everything they want. They don't know how poor women live, how women in rural places live, how 80 percent of women in the world are the poorest of the poor, how still there are 27 million slaves, and most of them women and girls.