Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.

My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men.

Something I always tell students is, when you're writing something, you want to write the first draft and you want it to come out easily in the beginning. If you're afraid to say what you really have to say, you stammer. When you're thinking of your listener, that's when you start stuttering and it's just because you're nervous that your listener is passing judgment.

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.

I can't stand it when people say, "If you're writing a novel, you should read this and that." Because it's like giving someone another person's prescription. How do you know that's what they need?

I have to take care of the house, and the dogs, and the Macondo Board meetings, all those e-mails, the letters that are going to fans. And you've got to pay bills. These things eat up your time. You have to prepare and pack to go on that trip. Then when you come back you have to file all that stuff, answer all that mail, and that's not even washing the clothes or any of that. So it takes as many days as I've been away to come back to normal and to get quiet.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.