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

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.

There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping.

Marshall Rosenberg talks about how we can create peace in the communities we work with. He's been traveling to warring nations to create peace within those countries.

You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.

What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.