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

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable.

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.

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.

I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!” “Finish your eggs first.

A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.

The First Lady is going to be criticized no matter what she does.

Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me… the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture’s power to construct our days and nights.

The great difference is, that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some, and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.

truth … is the first casualty of tyranny.

All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

I was an artist, I was executive producer on my first album, so I’ve always had to manage both. I couldn’t get a record deal. It wasn’t by choice – I couldn’t get a record deal, so I had to figure it out.