“Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.”

We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.

Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories…The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.

I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

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.

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.

It’s never been seen that a street artist go as far as I’ve gone – keep consistent without wanting to do a bunch of ventures outside of music to keep my face out there.

With ‘Lady Macbeth,’ I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I’m not talking about Russia in my music. I’ve never been to Russia. I’m not talking about Africa, Switzerland, China.

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That’s so many pages longhand.

Everything’s a film idea if this is what you do.I’ve always been secretly confident that I’d never run out of ideas,because I’ve never had any.

I’ve been more content with just who I am.

Allow me to put the record straight. I am forty-six and have been for some years past.

The biggest thing, and what I told some of the partners in the summit, was me thanking them for their constant support with everything that I’ve been through the last couple years on and off the court.