I was labeled at a young age - Miss Unemotional, Miss Cool, and that would carry over to my press conferences.
The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.
What literature can and should do is change the people who teach the people who don't read the books.
They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed. One night they fell asleep, side by side. . . He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Biographies are no longer written to explain or explore the greatness of the great. They redress balances, explore secret weaknesses, demolish legends.
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.
I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK.
If you don't believe in same-sex marriage, then don't marry somebody of the same sex.
I'm not sure who invented dodgeball, but I can almost guarantee you that it wasn't the shortest kid in the class.
[Takashi] Murakami, do you think he is spiritual? He is more like de-spiritualized. De-spiritualized might be the most contemporary aspect of the human mind.