How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.

Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.

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.

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.

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

It doesn't make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn't we trust them instead of being afraid of them?

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