That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.

I would drive on streets that were one-way and think, "Why are they all honking at me?"

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.

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.

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.

One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.

I was reading all these male writers who were doing wild and wonderful things. It gave me permission to experiment.