People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.

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 'Net is a waste of time, and that's exactly what's right about it.

To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.

In a sense, having cancer takes you by the shoulders and shakes you.

Even other movies I wasn't involved with, I'd watch them edit 'cause I really enjoy watching them go through their process. It's a very economical, educational process.

Maybe there's something about the outsiderness of being Jewish that makes for a fiery feminist type.

God sometimes allows us to feel anger so we'll recognize when we're being mistreated. But even when we experience true injustices in our lives, we must not vent our anger in an improper way.

How unfortunate it is to be constrained by what people might say at our funeral or on our gravestone.

You are engaged in an undertaking of major importance to you. To be sure of success, you must have plans which are faultless.

When I grew up in Flatbush, 'we played football, stickball and baseball all the time, right out there on the city streets. Football was my favorite.

Prayer for me is an updward leap of the heart