Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages

You are my angel and my damnation; in your presence I reach divine ecstasy and in your absence I descent to hell.

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

People think that they will sit down and produce the great American novel in one sitting. It doesn't work that way. This is a very patient and meticulous work, and you have to do it with joy and love for the process, not for the outcome.

I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.

My books are based on emotions, feelings, relationships. In these areas women are experts, so it's not strange that the main characters of my novels are females.