Selected Quotes

"I write to save what would otherwise be lost."

"To write is to carve words into the silence of death."

"My books are not about me, they are about us."

"I am not looking for myself in my books, I am looking for what I am not the only one to have experienced."

"The personal is not opposed to the political, it is its raw material."

"I do not write to heal. I write to understand."

"Class is what remains when you think you have left everything behind."

"There is no pure memory, only memory shaped by the present that recalls it."

"To write one's life is to realize that it has been lived by forces beyond oneself."

"Literature is not luxury but necessity—the necessity of understanding what we are."