Once you can open yourself to joy, you feel as if you've transformed your sadness into illumination, which is really all that art is. All we want to do is transform the negative emotions into light. We want to compost them into light.

If educators were really understanding of that, they'd say, "You know what? Forget about bilingual, we're going to do multilingual education." So children are ready for the new millennium. We're way behind compared to countries in Europe. If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture.

When we started publishing, you had to be better than good. You had to be excellent. But as long as people are reading, I don't care what they're reading.

One of the things Thich Nhat Hanh taught me: he says, "When you're in a hurry, go slower." That works every time, unless you're trying to catch a plane.

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.

There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.

If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture.