I know there are a lot of women who are afraid of driving on highways.

What you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do. It's always bigger than what you think you can handle, but you're never going to be given something you can't handle.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

I'm not afraid to say what I'm afraid of. Does that make me fearless?

You know how sometimes you meet writers that are so full of themselves? They feel really proud that they wrote something . But what they don't understand - and I like to tell this to writers - is that writing is like fishing. It's just like fishing. If you don't fish that often, you're not going to catch that many fish.

We women shouldn't get our driver's licenses till real late in life.

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.