When I look back at my role as labor secretary, I regret that I didn't fight harder. I mean, inside the meeting rooms in the old executive office building and the cabinet office, and even when I was talking in private to the president - President Clinton, I did try to argue my case, but I feel, in retrospect, I should have argued even more passionately. Maybe I even should have threatened to resign.

I don't think I really understood that you could choose writing as a profession for many years later. It wasn't really until I was 17, when I read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and saw, 'Oh, someone like me, a black woman, can do this ...

In retrospect, I certainly think it would have been much better from a public relations viewpoint not to have played the games, because I did respect President Kennedy a great deal.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I would say that half of it was adversity. It was people discouraging me that got me into writing. I had a partner, a business partner, who ended up cheating me, as a matter of fact.

I didn’t fear failure. I expected failure. I think I’ve always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than success. The success took me by surprise and it frightened me.

I remember one teacher in particular. I was in a school in the third grade and they were thinking of skipping me, putting me in a higher grade. But then somebody said that would be bad psychologically. So, for that entire year, because I had learned all the lessons that year — the multiplication tables, whatever the reading was — this teacher let me go off by myself and draw pictures. So I had hours and hours of time where I was just left to my own devices, drawing pictures. And she would encourage me. That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn’t become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do. I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that’s what I do as a writer. I just sit by myself, being in my own mind, not being directed at what I should be doing moment-by-moment, not having a clear plan set out by anybody and just letting imagination enter into the blank page. So in that respect, I can thank Miss Grudoff of the third grade for allowing me that.

I go back to this idea that I only discovered when I was older. I wish I had known it when I was younger, because I think I missed a lot of observations in life. That is to develop your own philosophy. I always thought philosophy was one of the most useless subjects in the world.