At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free. Books go a little wavy, but they’re mine, so who cares.

While it might be true that our reality would suggest that more writers would address these elemental issues of modern life - work, the marketplace, brutality, race - I'm not sure I have enough of a sense in aggregate of what the dominant novelists are doing to comment on why less do, or if less do. Maybe that's partly because I don't feel woven into any kind of fabric of contemporaries; I just read what I read, and do what I do.

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

People are complicated. Personally I don't go in for puritanical people.

And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

People who are harder to love pose a challenge, and the challenge makes them easier to love. You're driven to love them. People who want their love easy don't really want love.