I remember when they started publishing Latino fiction years ago. You had to be really good to get published. Now you don't have to be that good.

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.

Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It’s all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

People express their arrogance in their failed expectations.

Minimalism is not defined by what is not there but by the rightness of what is and the richness with which this is experienced.

The NGOs in Israel should devote more time to monitoring religious anti-Israel groups, chief among them the so-called "Christian Palestinianists."

If one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything.

When you find yourself on the Internet when you're supposed to be writing, you've already lost. It's even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet.

Enjoy the pregnancy, not racing ahead and relishing the moment. I think people see pregnancy as something to get over with, but every stage of becoming a mother is really special.

I'm feminine, but I wouldn't say that I'm girly in any way at all.

To saucy doubts and fears.