“Images are … a kind of emotional shorthand.”

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not by exhortation.

The trick is not how much pain you feel–but how much joy you feel. Any idiot can feel pain.

Motherhood cannot finally be delegated.

A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

I vowed to give up sex, bacon, and air travel if I ever made it back to terra firma in one piece.

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

Every time I catch myself saying, “Oh no, you shouldn’t try that,” I think, “Yes, I should.”

They keep saying the right person will come along. I think mine got hit by a truck.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Conflict is the soul of literature.

You can’t be creative and still be a good girl.

Memory is the most transient of all possessions. And when it goes, it leaves as few traces as stars that have disappeared.

The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I’m thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho.

It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.

Old age is a special problem for me because I’ve never been able to shed the mental image I have of myself – a lad of about 19.

There’s no image we can’t improve.

I’m trying everything. But voice work is the best thing you ever imagined. It’s not about how you look, and you can go to work in your PJs.

it’s not my job to preach a sermon. Art is anyhow a homily. My job is to speak in living images, not in arguments. I must exhibit life full-face, not discuss life.

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

Of course it’s very, very important for me to feel Kenya, to feel, every day, this is where images come from. So to be taken away from that by political pressure or other means – one is taken away from the area, which is the basis of inspiration – is difficult.

Why should I consent to the perpetuation of the image of this image?

But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That’s why I call it the most social of the various art forms.