I may not have a practical mind, but it's very fixated on concrete things. I like detail.

I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time.

The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.

So, you know, I always say that I'm a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I'd be a citizen of Manhattan. I feel very much a New Yorker.

You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.