I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.

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

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

I see that in the future, things that we have lost in the past will be recovered. There's a search for those things, a search for spirituality, for nature, for the goddess religions, for family and human bonding. All that has been lost in this industrial era. People are in desperate need of those things. I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it.

For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity.

Writing is a constant exercise in longing.

My father says that fear is good; it's the body's alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can't be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid.