Do work that matters. Vale la pena

Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself.

the world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

I can't seem to stay out of my own way.

Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads