I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and change things for fictional use.

Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.

All women are misfits. We do not fit into this world without amputations.

Whatever is not an energy source, is an energy sink.

I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.

Pain is a forcing sieve that turns me to gruel.