Each book gets harder, each book gets harder and harder. I always feel like crying when I have to write.

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.

I think that it's not enough to do the little Band-Aid things of having celebrities come and read to children. Not that we don't need to read to children, but we don't need to just do it one time and feel good about it. I think we need to think long range about poor people and their relationship to libraries.

I think there's a rule that once you want to live somewhere, you can't find a job.

Heartbreak makes us stronger; it's an opportunity for spiritual growth. How can you understand someone else's pain if you have not yourself suffered?

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.

[Courage] always bigger than what you think you can handle, but you're never going to be given something you can't handle. So you say, "Okay, when you tell me what it is that I'm supposed to do, please give me the courage to do it."