I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

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.

We become what we believe

What's sort of interesting about the whole public relations disaster that is the Net, in some ways, is that the fundamentals are really good.

But I could be wrong.

The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.

I don't have everything I want but I have everything I need. That's contentment.

Progress is man's indifference to the lessons of history.

Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it.

True success and true happiness not only go together but each other enhances the other.

We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of a world revolution. (On Muammar Qaddafi of Libya)

I have sounded the very base-string of humility.