San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way.

I have this great fear of Mexico City. I won't go to Mexico City unless someone meets me at the airport and is with me. I just feel very vulnerable there.

I know the American Library Association has models for working with the poor. They do have that, and I think that we really need to put our efforts - if we want to think long-range and invest in the community so that we don't have to, you know, invest in prisons - into making a change, because I know that the library can make a change in a life, because it made a change in mine.

I think that you need to have books that talk about the lives of the poor, and they need to be involved - involved in acquisitions.

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

If you have potato chips, that means, "Who's coming over?"Wealthy people - white people who're wealthy - have a bag of potato chips that's folded over with a clip. "What? There's some left over?" In my house, if there was a bag of potato chips, we'd pour it in a bowl and everybody would just dip in till it was gone.