I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this "diversity" claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

When a society doesn't know what to do with its young, it's in real trouble. When the young don't know what to do with society - at the very least, revolutions start there.

My decision was sparked by affirmative action. There was a point in my life when affirmative action would have meant something to me - when my family was working-class, and we were struggling.