In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

Our ancestors are an ever widening circle of hope.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.