No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez.

No one wrote better about the sin of pride, the corruption of power and the redemption of love. I will miss you, Gabriel García Márquez.

I love James Baldwin essays, but also his novels. I recently read "Another Country." I couldn't believe how ahead of his time he was.

I began reading in French. I didn't read in English until high school.

Every book leaves its mark on you. It might leave you hungry for that kind of book or you may be satiated, and you're eager to read something else. It might send you in a completely different direction. I love that about reading.

Few [books] get translated and the ones that do have trouble making it into the mainstream. It's more likely that Americans will discover another culture through an American writer rather read a writer from that culture.

I read "The Conquest of New Spain" by Bernal Diz Del Castillo, which I recommend to a lot of people. He was an eyewitness of [Hernando] Cortez's conquest of Mexico. It's at once very brutal and at times very plodding. It tells what they did everyday, so days can go by and nothing happens. Then all of the sudden they are torturing and doing all these dark things.