Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.

To be alive is to listen quietly while other people talk. That's how you learn something.

I was doing that thing the infatuated do, stitching destiny onto the person we want stitched to us.

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.

People who want their love easy don't really want love.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

It's amazing how life conspires to set you up with what you need.

A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious.

I don't regard the real and true and authentic as something to claim as a moral high ground.

I don't really see art as structured by logic.

If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.

How many memories can come through at once before they are just jumbled words and faces mixed together by years of pain?

That excuse only works until you discover the person is merely an individual like any other.

Religion is an outcome of the human weakness, or The limitation of human knowledge, or the fear.

When you have a dark side, nothing is ever as good as it seems.

During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs.

The fully planned economy, so far from being unpopular, is warmly regarded by those who know it best.

Never have anyone else carry your luggage. Pack only what you need.

Folly enlarges men's desires while it lessens their capacities.

Because we don't see the evil destroyed now and thus experience the suffering that evil inevitably inflicts, we are tempted to doubt God's existence and goodness.