In a way, I think we all want to look to that journalistic voice as a kind of global omniscience, a big eye to correct for our own limited purview: "Here's a realistic accounting of the world in which we live."

I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

I want a real encounter with something true and disconcerting about peoples' natures.

Mythology is a really beautiful vocabulary passed down through centuries that helps us understand the perennial parts of our nature.