I have a B.A. in Spanish, so briefly I thought that somebody might pay me to speak Spanish badly in another country, like Norway.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

America's great talent, I think, is to generate desires that would never have occurred, natively,... and to make those desires so painfully real that money becomes a fiction, an imaginary means to some concrete end.

It's funny, for a long time I would go watermelon-red and deny that I was a magical realist. It felt imprecise to me, a misrepresentation.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.