L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

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.

There exist eternity in every moment.

The girls you meet are never very far from their worst-case scenario.

When you're out of will power you call on stubbornness, that's the trick.

My approach to acting now is so different -- I'm fearless because I have nothing to lose. Before [children] my identity was wrapped up in every decision -- now, I don't care.

Think of something finite molded into the infinite, and you think of man.

To hear the Japanese plead for free trade is like hearing the word love on the lips of a harlot.

The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve.

I think I skipped a lot of music, like when I was 17 or 18. I didnt know about a lot of new bands because I was so immersed in older music.

All great thinkers are initially ridiculed - and eventually revered.

If you wanna cross somebody, then do that. Don't act like it wasn't you