This country wants to live in the illusion that it is tolerant but also wants to be able to practice intolerance.

I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.

For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.

In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.