In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.

So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.

We're a long way from the embargo ending. Look at what just happened with the rollback of Obama's Cuba policies. Two idiot congressmen convinced our idiot president to make it harder on Cubans on the island.

Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they're both treated as such.

I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.

In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.

I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.