My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.

Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

'Hamlet' is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

We have an idea - a very modern idea - that dying is undignified. But I think this is because we have the illusion that we can control our bodies and our fates.

Our minds are mysterious; our conscious brain is like a ship on a sea that is obscure to us.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

One of the ideas I've clung to most of my life is that if I just try hard enough it will work out.