Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

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

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.

But the moment I saw you, I knew there was something more. There was something behind those big, beautiful brown eyes that I had to get to know, and, damn girl you’ve kept me in a trance ever since.

I believe you need scientific proof that something works before you entrust your health to it.

There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this theres certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind.

Sometimes when we're waiting for God to speak, He's waiting for us to listen.

Even at this late date, I go into my studio, and I think 'Is this going to be it? Is it the end?' You see, nearly everything terrorizes me. When an artist loses that terror, he's through.

I learned that I had to believe in myself and not just to be comfortable with the opinions of others. I'm just more in control; I finalize everything.

It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

That's something that I've always gotten: a sense of humanity, a sense of awareness of yourself and the world around you.

That energy field can be called God, soul, spirit, or consciousness.