“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.”

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.

In order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

Accept yourself within you and the entire world becomes totally acceptable.

Religion operates on the principle ‘I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.’ But the operating principle of the gospel is ‘I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.’

There’s winning and there’s losing, and in life you have to know they both will happen. But what’s never been acceptable to me is quitting.

Calling Michelle ‘Obama Barack’s baby mama?’ Tell me, is that acceptable? But the Obamas aren’t the only targets. Fox’s pattern of race-baiting and fear-mongering regularly focuses on black leaders, black institutions and ordinary black people.

I pledge to set standards of what is acceptable to my sanity and what to phase out.

In life, winning and losing will both happen. What is never acceptable is quitting.

Finally, the scariest thing about abuse of any shape or form, is, in my opinion, not the abuse itself, but that if it continues it can begin to feel commonplace and eventually acceptable.

So, the politicians and the people who make decisions very often is the one we think can make some difference. But of course they will not make a difference if the citizens or the individuals not push it or not to speak out, to possess a very strong voice about, this is not acceptable.