I'm just as unhappy about San Antonio as I was about Chicago. If you're unhappy about certain things, you're unhappy everywhere.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

I think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw, and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart.

I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.

I'm most tired after I read, after I've just done a performance, but what I try to do is to fuel and eat a really healthy meal before I perform. I want to have enough energy to talk to that last person.

I look at Thich Nhat Hanh and I look at Marshall Rosenberg, and they're more concerned about the long range. And that long range means that you have to sit down with people who don't think like you. I want to reach people who don't think like me.

I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It's what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.