I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

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.

The greatest healing therapy is friendship and love.

We've put songs out on singles and weird little packages that only the real vinyl-philes care about.

Einstein's theory of relativity does a fantastic job for explaining big things. Quantum mechanics is fantastic for the other end of the spectrum - for small things.

You can't just go on being a good egg. You must either hatch or go bad!

Comedy is so fun. I don't know how these people can make movies and work on them for four months and they're these sob stories. I don't know how emotionally you get through that.

Michael Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It caused quite a controversy, because his nose isn't eligible for another fifteen years.

London is my home... I know what's right and wrong here, and it's nice to have somewhere familiar to go back to.

Every role I've played, that could've happened. It's nice, it happens, but it is rather disconcerting when a young child comes up to at the airport and starts doing your lines, it happens.

Everybody that's living in this earth is living in a situation. It's not narrow-minded to the point where everybody is serious and nobody has a personality. I think people die telling jokes.

I can't stay No. 1 for fifty years, you know. We'll see what happens.