“I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.”

“I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.”