The writers who have been serious about recreating American literature have always been far and few between. What we do have at the end of the 20th century that we didn't have at the beginning, at that time of the Lost Generation of rich white boys, is a mixture. We're now getting gay writers of color, let's say, and women of color being published. This is unprecedented.

There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

We live in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies and paradoxes: light vs. dark and good vs. evil. We as Mexic Amerindians/mestizas are the dark. We are the evilor at least, the questionable.

I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.

You know you have that zealousness of the young person that feels like you can go out and do it all. You know you save the world, save your gente, save women and before you know it if you try to do that you will burn out very quickly. My feeling is that I always think that and my advice to young people regardless of what times in these decades we've been living in there's always work to be done. The point is what can you do personally that you can live with so that you can get up the next morning and have the strength to start it all over again.

I feel that it's very important for young people to have a sense of history and do research and don't re-invent the wheel and don't think that you're the first martyr to discover social injustice but to take advantage of previous generations of activists and find out what they did and how they resolved things.