Even though it's hard to believe, but people who know me really well know I'm shy. I have to go past that fear.

You know, we should have cards like the deaf have. "Can't talk, I'm writing today."

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."

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.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

One of the things we learned from that panel is the way poor communities use a library is very different from wealthy communities. But the way the library books are measured are by how many books are taken out. And people in poor communities sometimes won't take the book out because they're afraid to. They're afraid of losing it and not being able to replace it.

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.