Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos: believe what you want and don't look carefully at what isn't acceptable to you.

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.

Surviving is good, but overcoming is better.

I am more interested in the purpose of government than its mechanics-though the means should at least be good enough to lead to the ends desired.

You can measure a man's worth by the breed of person he throws out of his office.

I'm concerned about organized religion getting away with what it gets away with.

In Google's world, public space is just something that stands between your house and the well-reviewed restaurant that you are dying to get to.

I sat. And I thought. And the more I thought, connecting the events in my life, the more my heart collapsed.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.

The emerging picture is one where slavery, oppression and exploitation of society's most vulnerable members have by no means been consigned to the past.

What barrier is so insurmountable as silence?

People like to think that actors are terribly worried about ghosts of other actors in the parts they play. But you just have to get on with it.