Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.

...memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.

Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.

We don't have an explanation for everything that happens. We don't control almost anything. And if we are not open to that mystery, life becomes so small.

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.

In the United States, the fact that you can start again gives a lot of energy and strength and youth to this country. That is why it's so powerful in many ways, and so creative.