There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Women really are not supposed to be imaginative. That creativity of this kind is supposed to belong to men. You know, because women make babies. I find the double standards shocking.

Being a mother is complicated because its not just a paternal culture making demands on you; its those internal demands and expectations that women have and are self-generated.