Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context.

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.

In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don't get older men. As I'm getting older, my audience gets younger!

And I am not one of those women who trips twice over the same stone.

Barrabas came to us by the sea.

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