There used to be a category called women's fiction - meaning not too rude, not too much sex, a bit domestic and internal. Women have changed so much. We're so varied. And we've become more interested in the same varied experience in fiction.

You must find a boy your own age. Someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered. Someone whose fingers are a poem.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?"

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

What can I say about life? Do I praise it for letting you live, or damn it for allowing the rest?

As a person with terrible handwriting, I love the computer. I've waited all my life for the computer.

I could hear the icy winds of Sweden, but he didn't seem to feel the chill.