Sometimes hearing the stories is going to change people's lives much more than if they read it.

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.

Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached.

My best training came from doing illustrations because it taught me to compose my paintings more effectively, to improve my colors, and to be ruthlessly selective.

I should have been a country-western singer. After all, I'm older than most western countries.

For the Divine to function through you, it is important to make every breath, every pulsation in the body, and your very existence an offering.

It used to irritate a friend of mine that when he went to confession he never got the chance to tell the priest the good things he had done.

Testimony is contingent on experience, that's why we're all free spirits

There was a nobility in poverty when I was growing up. My mom was poor but she was planting roses and she was cleaning the steps, you know what I mean. You didn't feel sorry for yourself.

And so I was doing that and starving and somebody said you should model and I ran when they told me how much money you could make and I did a television commercial the first job.

Take the dead from the dead, the old proverb said; only a corpse may speak true prophecy.

The coward is an object to be pitied.