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.

The first few months of my life of every year are in total retreat. I don't see anybody except my husband and my dog, I don't talk to anybody, and I just write.

Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.

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.

Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.

She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.