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

On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.