There is no real appeal for me in an image of a woman on a motorcycle.

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.

My grandmother, a dim, stern figure, named her children Lily and Violet, which I guess from seeing a picture of my mother's paved, ugly backyard, was the nearest she came to a garden.

Regret drives us to repentance, and repentance leads us to God.

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference. It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left. It is the nativity of our common Adam.

Remember me when I am gone away, gone far away into the silent land.

I am a ceiling fan, especially during rain.

Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?

Although we love the idea of choice - our culture almost worships it - we seek refuge in the familiar and the comfortable.

It wasn't a conscious effort to have kids later. It was just the way life goes.

Throughout human history, the American Idea has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed.

No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.