I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn't a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.

Writing can be bad and still be part of something good. That 'art' is really 'artifact,' Exhibit A, Exhibit B, of something else: a person's whole experience and life. And that always there's the chance that this will fail. That things will not work out.

Stalinism - or communism - is the only ideology Americans know how to demonise... no one knows what it is, it's just a synonym for the Empire of Evil.

In Mexico, muralism is an important part of the artistic vocabulary, and it has a very different place than it does in the US. Here, you see mainly commercial signage and dead slick graphic works, or murals that are incredibly narrative and littered with too much content - bad political art. But in Mexicali, all kinds of artists work with mural art. In Mexicali, the social practice of art existed in a completely authentic and unselfconscious way.

Nothing's ever entirely new. It's more a matter of what gets picked up from the past at each time.

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our debasement?

I think writers always want to be taken seriously as writers, but it's not always possible. There's a difference between persistence and banging your head against the same wall a hundred times. Sometimes it's better to look away from the wall and see what else might be available that's easier.