Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul.

Dying is not easy. It's a very hard transition.

The connection that I have with my readers makes me very happy, and gives meaning to the strange profession of writing

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.

I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.

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.