Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together.