Ruth Ozeki

Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.

When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.

I think that all writing is in search of lost time. I'm starting to realise that very clearly.

The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.