We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

You can't say, "I'm too busy writing to be political." You are one person.

Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.

Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

My novels are very much the same, as I think many people's novels are. No matter how hard I try to do otherwise, the books always wind up being "a group of strangers are thrown together by circumstance and form a society."

We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs.

It is said the sesta is one of the only gifts the Europeans brought to South America, but I imagine the Brazilians could have figured out how to sleep in the afternoon without having to endure centuries of murder and enslavement.