The stories are what no one wants to talk about. So you make up a story because no one is going to tell you the truth.

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.

I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.

My idea was always to start with a small press and then move up to a national press. I had those goals for my career from the time I was a very young woman. I wanted to win a local award, then I wanted a state or national award. Small press, big press. Some women fantasize about their weddings, their husbands, and children. I fantasized about what I wanted to accomplish with my books.

I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me.

My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God. She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.

I think that you need to have books that talk about the lives of the poor, and they need to be involved - involved in acquisitions.