Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.