“My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.”

It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

Women, in all fields – whether mothers or not – still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.

As a girl – twelve, thirteen years old – I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.

I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely.

God, the true Philosopher’s Stone, Who answers every prayer, Lies hidden deep within your heart.

Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence.

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations.

Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

Making money is not gonna change anything about what I am, except I won’t answer the door.

In order for answers to become clear, the questions have to be clear.