At the time I was taught to read, it was an Eden-like time of my life. My mother adored me. Everyone adored me. So I associate reading with enormous pleasure.

...yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

I would be lost without the feeling of antagonism that people have towards me. I write out of defiance.

What I really want to write about is injustice and justice, and the different ways human beings organize the two.

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart—idea of thing, reality of thing—the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.

A tourist is an ugly human being.