Perhaps she was both child and woman, darkness and light, past and present, life and death - all the opposites contained and reconciled in her.

A person can run for years but sooner or later he has to take a stand in the place which, for better or worse, he calls home, and do what he can to change things there.

My very first lessons in the art of telling stories took place in the kitchen . . . my mother and three or four of her friends. . . told stories. . .with effortless art and technique. They were natural-born storytellers in the oral tradition.

We live surrounded by white images, and white in this world is synonymous with the good, light, beauty, success, so that, despite ourselves sometimes, we run after that whiteness and deny our darkness, which has been made into the symbol of all that is evil and inferior.

I realise that it is fashionable now to dismiss the traditional novel as something of an anachronism, but to me it is still a vital form. Not only does it allow for the kind of full-blown, richly detailed writing that I love . . . but it permits me to operate on many levels and to explore both the inner state of my characters as well as the worlds beyond them.

I question whether I want to be integrated into America as it stands now, with its complacency and materialism, its soullessness.

But sometimes it's necessary to go back before you can go forward, really forward.