Art is like a stock with a decent return for people in finance, and they get to feel like they are involved with culture, spend time with artists, as part of their dividend.

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.

Anyone can exist. Most fools do. It takes guts to truly Live.

We are united by the bond of love.

We were chosen by God’s to be His special possession.

Our way is straight and clear - the building up of a socialist democracy at home, with freedom and prosperity for all, and the maintenance of world peace and friendship with all nations abroad.

How are his poems?" "He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

A leader must face danger. He must take the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.

We ought to love temperance for itself, and in obedience to God who has commanded it and chastity; but what I am forced to by catarrhs, or owe to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance.

Tradition is a fine thing. Nothing comes out of the blue, except perhaps thunderbolts and they are not really very useful things.

In this world there is one godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of godlike in this world: the veneration done to Human Worth by the hearts of men.

Life without dreaming is a life without meaning.