Can I tell my daughter that I loved her father? This was the man who rubbed my feet at night. He praised the food that I cooked. He cried honestly when I brought out trinkets...

After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what’s comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with...

My writing often contains souvenirs of the day – a song I heard, a bird I saw – which I then put into the novel.

Isn’t hate merely the result of wounded love?

What happened to Violet was terrible, and I’m not saying fate happens without blame. But when fate turns out well, everyone should forget the bad road that got us here.

It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.

Entonces debes enseñarle esta misma lección a mi hija. Cómo perder la inocencia pero no la esperanza. Cómo reír eternamente.

Quiero que nuestro amor sea tan grande que nos duela por dentro

I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read – which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books...

Kehidupan hanyalah ilusi yang harus kau lepaskan. Ketika makin tua, kau menyadari perubahan posisimu sehubungan dengan kematian. Di masa muda topik kematian adalah filosofis, di usia tiga puluhan topik itu tidak bisa diterima, dan di...

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

God, life changes faster than you think.

Placing on writers the responsibility to represent a culture is an onerous burden.

If you can’t change your fate, change your attitude.

Our love would be solace, companionship, and the mending of wounds.

The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

You remember only what you want to remember. You know only what your heart allows you to know.

All objects exist in a moment of time.

When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it’s all part...

Ahora sabes por qué razón es inútil llorar. Tus lágrimas no se llevan tus penas, sino que alimentan la alegría de otros. Por eso has de aprender a tragártelas.

…and it’s ridiculous that anyone would praise a child for standing with arms spread out on a wooden cross, as if she were Jesus’s dead sister wearing a checkerboard tablecloth.

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.

Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie’s mom down the...

,Acaso el odio no es un simple resultado del amor herido?

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer.

I do not consider myself a religious person, because I don’t adhere to a particular religion or faith or prescribed beliefs, as did my father, who was a Baptist minister. And I am not an...

Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else’s joy. And that is why you must learn to swallow your own tears.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you’ve just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

What are ghosts if not the hope that love continues beyond our ordinary senses? If ghosts are a delusion, then let me be deluded.

wisdom is like a bottomless pond. You throw stones in and they sink into darkness and dissolve. Her eyes looking back do not reflect anything.I think this to myself even though I love my daughter....

Words to me were magic. You could say a word and it could conjure up all kinds of images or feelings or a chilly sensation or whatever. It was amazing to me that words had...

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.

Dementia was like a truth serum.

…I was like a bird, my wings once carried on a wind of lies. I would beat those wings to stay aloft, and when the wind suddenly died or buffeted me around, I would keep...

No one in my family was a reader of literary fiction. So, I didn’t have encouragement, but I didn’t have discouragement, because I don’t think anybody knew what that meant.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

You see what power is – holding someone else’s fearin your hand and showing it to them

how can the world in all its chaos come up with so many coincidences, so many similarities and exact opposites?

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.

Forever did not mean what it once had. Forever was what changed inevitably over time.

What should we do?”, I asked, and I had a pained feeling I thought was the beginning of love. In those early months we clung to each other with a rather silly desperation, because, in...

I have survivor skills. Some of that is superficial – what I present to people outwardly – but what makes people resilient is the ability to find humour and irony in situations that would otherwise...

My mother had a very difficult childhood, having seen her own mother kill herself. So she didn’t always know how to be the nurturing mother that we all expect we should have.

too much happiness always overflowed into tears of sorrow.

It felt like all the truth got whitewashed with fake happiness,” she said, “only it was not happy and it was worse than fake. It was dangerous