A writer has to true to him or herself. Period. That’s it!

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

She learned that an act intended to express love could have nothing to do with it. That her heart and her body were different things.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

It didn't matter that I wore clothes from Sears; I was still different. I looked different. My name was different. I wanted to pull away from the things that marked my parents as being different.

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

For that story, I took as my subject a young woman whom I got to know over the course of a couple of visits. I never saw her having any health problems - but I knew she wanted to be married.