My Spanish is a daughter's Spanish. I write, but my Spanish really is very limited.

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.

How small a thought it takes to fill a life.

The paradise of praying is like a palace of full of precious things.

Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience. What we project about the future reveals a lot—about the world we live in, and about our own past.

Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness?

It is better we disintegrate in peace and not in pieces.

I am optimistic. But I also know that, with time, I'm beginning to fight issues of aging as well as long-term paralysis.

People call me a perfectionist, but I'm not. I'm a rightist. I do something until it's right, and then I move on to the next thing.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.

I like to make my guitar sound mean.

Mistake is a mistake only if you make it twice.