Part of me has always wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe or any Fifties Hollywood starlet. On screen, they seemed so sexy and simple and looked after. In real life, I'm none of those things. But I'd...

For a book to function... it has to be a functioning reality. The character has to be real, and I imagine that's exactly what happens for a spy who is in deep cover.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I...

I was born in India... Gujarat. I am an Indian! And India is a democratic country, anyone can stand for elections. I can also stand for elections.

I wasn't born to a wealthy or powerful family - mother from Puerto Rico, dad from the South Bronx.

I know who my dad is, I've met him a few times, but I don't even call him dad. I know it sounds horrible, but I don't even see him as part of my family, to be honest. If you want the truth, it doesn't...

A lot of people think I'm that guy in 'Betsy's Wedding', but I'm not. What it is for me is that, on some level, I connect with the character emotionally.

My sister's journal was the romantic one with boys, and mine was talking about my rock tumbler. We were so different and so similar.

My mom's one of 13 siblings, and they all got six kids, and till I was 13 everybody was in Compton.

Nobody would know it to look at me, but the movies I liked as a kid were musicals - 'All That Jazz,' 'Hair,' 'Fame,' 'Annie,' all that stuff - that's where my little youthful imagination was.

Whenever I think of my birthplace, Walton-on-Thames, my reference first and foremost is the river. I love the smell of the river; love its history, its gentleness. I was aware of its presence from my...

In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.

If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?

We aren't cool and never will be.

Or maybe they weren't changing. Maybe they were just now becoming what they had always wanted to be.

What is it about guys named Adam?

He was in a strange, badly lit room, wearing even stranger clothes, getting an earful from an unknown woman, in a language that he could and couldn't exactly place in a very disturbing way. These were...

What makes you think that people with other types of clothes are special? I can go to the shop, buy such clothes, and what? Now I am important?

"I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then...

Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you.

Each of us has been designed for one of two immortal functions, as either a storyteller or as a cross-legged listener to tales of wonder, love, and daring. When we cease to tell or listen, then we no...

I smiled at him. America, I said quietly, just like that. What is it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true? That's a fact.

But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to...

I think life becomes a fabric of choices, interwoven, all related... I split my life into these two things, thief and lady

There's the trick: to find the way - whether forwards or back - to what we long to be.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia - but at least I'd learned to walk and talk enough...

So I found myself telling my own stories. It was strange: as I did it I realised how much we get shaped by our stories. It's like the stories of our lives make us the people we are. If someone had no...

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

In the space of solitude, a writer attempts to remember how they became whom they are but nobody's memory is up to this demanding task. No matter how much a person harrows the fertile lanes of memory,...

She had a sense of longing and loss that she had never had before. It was as if her family history had been erased and they'd been left unmemorable. She imagined that Rachel's family must have similar...