I'm surrounded by young people. I'm always now the oldest and the shortest person in the room.

Music is a wind that blows away the years, memories, and fear, that crouching animal I carry inside me.

My name is Eva, which means 'life,' according to a book of names my mother consulted. I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

One of the characteristics of North American culture is that you can always start again. You can always move forward, cross a border of a state or a city or a county, and move West, most of the time West. You leave behind guilt, past traditions, memories. You are as if born again, in the sense of the snake: You leave your skin behind and you begin again. For most people in the world, that is totally impossible.

I'm an expert. I can kill anybody and not be caught.

I am very optimistic because I have seen the changes in my lifetime. I have seen the world change for the better. We always think that present times is terrible, that what's happening today, it was never worse, that the world is going in the most awful direction. But I think that the world that my grandchildren will have will be better than the one I had when I turned 20.