Generally if you're a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.

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.

If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.

I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me.

There's a lot of people that need these stories, and they can't come to my book, so I'm going to be the bookmobile and I'm going to come to them.

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

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