There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance

How we dress is, as far as I can tell, the only inescapably public choice that we have. People don't need to know what you eat, people don't need to know who you have sex with. But there's no escaping what you wear and the fact that you've chosen it. Even if you insist that you don't care about fashion, that's your statement. It's really one realm of life where you are forced to make your own statement.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.

I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.