Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

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

In short, I'm pretty suspicious of the idea that there's a real and true and authentic world, and then a bunch of false ones.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.