Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

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.

Loneliness isn't a disease, it is only a moment to learn something better

Everyone is on a journey at any given moment in their lives

One can describe the world of today to the people of today only if one describes it as capable of alteration.

There is no place for faith if we expect God to fulfill immediately what he promises.

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

I'm just glad that the whole John Wayne persona of a man is sort of old school now, because I'd never be able to do that. If that was the going rate today, I wouldn't be working.

No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.

People who have great lives think and talk about what they love more than what they don't love. And people who are struggling, think and talk about what they don't love more than what they do love.

More and more students are playing it safe and not taking any risks. You might not succeed, but that's just part of the game.

We know from biology that new forms of organisms simulate their primitive form as closely as possible at first, even though obliged to exist under changed internal and external conditions.