“One’s life completely changes based on the rain. After the monsoon, because the dust settles, one can see further and so it feels like one’s eyesight has improved or that one is living in a different country where there is more light.”

For me, a lot of the humor comes not from innocence but from characters trying to figure out how to get what they need. I don’t try to be funny, but am relieved when an opportunity comes up for humor.

The babies have old souls and the old souls have to shrink to become little babies.

As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions.

I tend to think that we are all pretty much alike. We all feel despair. We all have problems with relationships.

For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.

To me exposition always contains tenderness.

I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.

There are also so many emotional aspects to money – feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

The tears loosen their memories so they can slide away. They cry at the life they have lost, and then they cry at everything they’ll forget.

I realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind.

Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female.

It’s easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don’t want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

And let’s say in brief they live the Taliban style in Afghanistan, completely the same style.

Women want total freedom or rather – to call things by their names – total licence. If you allow them to achieve complete equality with men, do you think they will be easier to live with?

I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

We older artists are competing with the new style of country, with their new modern style of gospel, with the young people.

There are women who have completely transformed my view of fashion.

When you are completely absorbed or caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.

There are women who have completely transformed my view of fashion and if I hadn’t shown them I would never have arrived at this point in fashion, you see.

It’s possible to be completely enlightened… except with your family.