If we got an educational program going, we could tell people, "Instead of butter, use avocado." That's something we eat, it has the good fat, and it has a good texture, and it tastes better. Just imagine if you substituted that. Or if we switched to olive oil, the extra virgin olive oil, we could still have our taquitos, but put a little oil on them and put them in the oven and bake them.

I prefer to go to the little towns now, because in little towns people are kind. I like going to Tepotzlán.

I learn through listening and watching other performers that are very good, like Denise Chávez, Dorothy Allison.

Even if we don't know if God exists, we can be certain love exists, because its power transcends death.

Something I always tell students is, when you're writing something, you want to write the first draft and you want it to come out easily in the beginning. If you're afraid to say what you really have to say, you stammer. [...] You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.

I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.

Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.