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

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.

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.

My dear, it is a great strength to have faced the worst and to have *felt* it a feature of beauty. Nothing ever after can shake one.

Over time our tears will help heal the pain and soothe the hurt.

Life is a beautiful dream to be cherished, as long as it lasts.

When you pray rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart.

Tension is a prerequisite for creative living.

There is no life after death, so offer kindness to all, not in the next life but now

Fifty per cent of the public doesn't know what 'fifty per cent' means.

The reality is (Clinton's) so-called tax cut is basically giving money to people who largely don't pay taxes, so that it's really spending rather than a tax cut, ... This Week.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist.

Computers have changed the world of chess.