Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?

But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

Language is a social event.

You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.

Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico's great federalist and apologist, has coined a wonderful term, la raza cósmica, "the cosmic race," a new people having not one race but many in their blood.

(on forgiveness) Didn't he and I stand together before an all seeing God convicted of the same murder? For I had murdered him with my heart and my tongue.

In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.

I am a man More sinn'd against than sinning.

The air was full of spices... A Little Princess

The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department.

I don't think rock n' roll songwriters should worry about art. I don't think it comes into it...as far as I'm concerned, Art is just short for Arthur.

Jazz was uplifted by what I did.

It's kind of strange to be in a band for ten years, because you've just given ten years of your lives to it from touring, and you don't know [or] even notice the passing of time.

My enemies can take what they want, but my life is mine and so long as I breathe, it has value. I won't ever give up. Not again.

Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean.