I loved Charlotte Bronte when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Bronte the way people want to be a princess.

Something settiled inside me, something heavy and hard. It stayed there, and i could not think of one thing to make it go away. I thought, So this must be living, this must be the beginning of the time people later refer to as 'years ago, when I was young'.

Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I'm just the same. I'm always disappointed that I'm just the same, but not enough to never do it again!

The thing we call romance is a diversion from something truer, which is life.

I'm sometimes afraid I'll cross a line and it'll be difficult to come back, say, to dinner.

Here I am, a product of something really vicious, product of the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, I give nary a thought to some of the awful things happening right now in the world.

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.