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.

If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die.

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.

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

I'm surrounded by young people. I'm always now the oldest and the shortest person in the room.

A book is not an end in itself; it is only a way to touch someone - a bridge extended across a space of loneliness and obscurity - and sometimes it is a way of winning other people to our causes.

my husband, who is a lawyer, is very careful with words and with the truth. He thinks that the truth exists, and it's something that is beyond questioning, which I think is totally absurd. I have several versions of how we met and how wonderful he was and all that. At least twenty. And I'm sure that they are all true. He has one. And I'm positive that it's not true.