I have enormous respect for people who are gifted mechanics.

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.

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.

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.

True love is a feeling...which can neither be defined nor described!

I like Beyonce's music - some of it, not all of it.

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

MBAs know everything but understand nothing.

Kinsey Millhone is a female Sam Spade; a thorough professional, a loner, clear-headed and unsentimental.

Moral power is always more dangerous to an oppressor than political force.

I was going to be a writer. One person believed I could do it: my mom. Having her faith in me was like carrying around the Hammer of Thor.

Everything in my life has been leading up to this," he whispered. "Everything that's happened, everything I've done has been worth it because it's brought me here.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing ling'ring look behind?

Prudence is but experience, which equal time equally bestows on all men in those things they equally apply themselves unto.