You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. Or the comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

Now I feel life is really short and I have to take care of things.

You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, "Oooh . . ." Now my tactics are different.

There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping.