Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.

You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

There's a social and human necessity for some kind of continuity, but it's not axiomatic and not something you're born into; it's something you have to work at. And one of the ways to work at it - perhaps the best - is storytelling: telling stories about yourself to others, telling stories about yourself to yourself, telling stories about others to others.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.