People think [immigration] is only about the dollar, but it's so much more complex. This is a place where you can reinvent yourself. I don't know that you can do that anywhere else.

Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

if you don't exist in the arts of a culture, you're invisible. The arts are what express the soul of who we are and that expresses our humanity.

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unkown?

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

We're always going to have prejudices ... I don't think we can change society. You can only change individual by individual. And you can change yourself.

In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

I would just as soon remain jamona than shed that many tears over a man.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

My wife is the boss at home, and my daughters are the bosses. I am just the worker. We are a very warm family and very happy.

I cannot follow you Christians; for you try to crawl through your life upon your knees, while I stride through mine on my feet.

George Bush hates midgets.

Anything worth achieving will always have obstacles in the way

The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.

I'd been doing comedy up that point and hadn't really done a lot of drama, and then all of a sudden he casts me as a 400-year-old vampire from hell. It was, like, "What?!"

If the artist's will is not strong he will see all kinds of unessential things.

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love.