I ran my own business when I was 19, buying condos and renovating apartment buildings.

I was raised to work for my father when I was four.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

I am not a sun person at all. I think it's a cancerous poison and I don't want it touching me.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.

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

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.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

I was very precocious when I was young. I went to college at 16, and I graduated at 20. I wanted to be a writer, but I was more interested in experience than in applying myself intellectually.

It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.

L.A. is a great place to write because you have a lot of space. I have a big office at home, I can leave the doors open. Flowers bloom all year. But it's unglamorous in all the right ways.

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.