Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.

All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.

I am mad - but I choose this madness.

I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

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

The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.