Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.

Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.

Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.