I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing.

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.

Japan never considers time together as time wasted. Rather, it is time invested.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Travel can transform communities and lives around the world... Imagine if we got to a place where people can go on holidays as their way of giving back.

If you shoot an arrow and it goes real high... Hooray for you.

Al Qaeda still remains a threat.

A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.

The truth was, I wasn't sure. But I wanted to keep believing people could change, and it was certainly easier to do so when you were in the midst of it.

It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

Wine gives you liberty, love takes it away.