I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.

What you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do. It's always bigger than what you think you can handle, but you're never going to be given something you can't handle.

I usually say Latina, Mexican-American or American Mexican, and in certain contexts, Chicana, depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.

[Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.

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've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

There's all kinds of ways to wean yourself off of sugar - because it is like an addiction.