I was a fantastic student until ten, and then my mind began to wander.

Write from what you know into what you don't know.

I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

There isn't a story written that isn't about blood and money. People and their relationship to each other is the blood, the family. And how they live, the money of it.

A joke is necessary at this time.

I was fortunate that by the time I was born, there were a lot of comforts and at the same time I lived in a neighborhood where it was brought to my eyes every single day that people didn't live like me. Every day I knew that many of my friends "got relief." That was important in my thinking about the world, thinking that not everybody lived that way.