“It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place”

“If a person's religious ideas correspond not with your own, love him nevertheless. How different would yours have been, had the chance of birth placed you in Tartary or India!”

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.”

“It is the same with anything - you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can't learn it from a book.”

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also, you will have betrayed your community in failing to make your contribution.”

“You see mother, you had no life of your own. They have no idea. One has only a life of one's own.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for a writer to psychoanalyze herself or try to explain why she writes what she writes—it’s a reductive way of looking at oneself and one’s work. Readers really participate in the writing of a book. As a writer I’m giving the reader signs to help create the story with me. The reader is bringing his or her own memories, intelligence, preconceptions, prejudices, likes, dislikes. So the characters in your copy of the book are going to look and sound different than in mine. I have my own ideas, but once the book is out there it’s not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn’t any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging.”

“At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you'll have to find your inner motivation to seek for new ideas on your own.”

“They will tell you, you can't sleep alone in strange place.
Then they'll tell you, you can't sleep with somebody else.
Ah, but sooner or later you sleep in your own space.
Either way, it's okay, you wake with yourself.”

“You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”