'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.

Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.

That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.

Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.

I was one of those people raised by a woman who was what I call a prisoner of war. She was captured, she didn't want to be there, she was unhappy, she was banging away in the kitchen, the way that a prisoner would bang on her jail cell, you know, really unhappy. She had to cook for nine people with really little money, so she really just got burned out. So I didn't know that you could actually cook and it would be calming, pleasurable.

I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.