My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.

• Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
• 'Thank you' is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
• As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.
• As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young.
• I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again.
• We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that's going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.
• Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
• I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'
• The experience of God, or in any case the possibility of experiencing God, is innate.
• All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.