Generally if you're a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.

We might 'conquer' nature if we could first, or at the same time, conquer our own nature, though we do not see that human nature and 'outside' nature are all of a piece.

I travel because life is short, and I will not wait for fear of death or sanctuary to become a prison of my own making.

The value of routine

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

You will see - in the future, I will live by my watercolors.

I deal with the obvious. I present, reiterate, and glorify the obvious - because the obvious is what people need to be told.

The political environment we create matters because a disturbed person cannot always tell the difference between explosive rhetoric and explosive actions.

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

Fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe.

I really can't complain about anything. I'm living a childhood dream and I have a perfect family. There's really nothing that I'm disappointed with.