You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, "Oooh . . ." Now my tactics are different.

For me, a story's a story if people want to hear it; it's very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I'm speaking it out loud.

You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.

That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

The thoughts of letting go of everything I love overwhelms like a tsunami of sorrow.

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.