People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.

We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.

The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.

The border between the dead and the living, if you're Mexican, doesn't exist. The dead are part of your life.

True love in Mexico isn't between lovers; it's between a parent and a child. Mexico is a very intense culture of sons adoring their mothers, and this is why I claim that Mexican culture is matriarchal. Because the one constant, faithful, inviolable, holy love of loves - the love of your life - is not your wife or your lover; it's your mother.

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.

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.