When my novel 'Beach Music' came out in 1995, I had included a couple of recipes in the book and had tried to impart some of my love of Roman cuisine and the restaurants of Rome.

…Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and fourth porpoise neared. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak—and then as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us…Each of us would remember that all during our lives. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set, and I would go back in my imagination, and return to where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

Love came in wounded and frantic ways to my dismaying family.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

Music could ache and hurt, that beautiful music was a place a suffering man could hide.

Without music and dance, life is a journey through a desert.