But we all dream of, you know, the great novel that we will write some day when we have time. And it’s probably not happening.

So, you know, I always say that I’m a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I’d be a citizen of Manhattan. I-I feel very much a New Yorker.

You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.

I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don’t cook very much. I love kitchens.

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I’ve seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

For the kids, who in their lives have never known the slightest power, delinquency is a way of looking for power.

I may not have a practical mind, but it’s very fixated on concrete things. I like detail.

The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I’m completely in awe...

These kids who have no place in the world, who nobody has ever made room for, look at least for a place in time, in the present through fashion. It’s vitally important to them to...

I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I...

The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that’s why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive...

An essential part of the magic involves turning everyone into an enemy, to ward off surprises.

I think that one of the things that we can really all feel very happy about is that the human rights situation in Latin America has improved enormously over the last 10 years, enormously, enormously....

The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.

Apologists for the drug trade often argue that the upper classes and the political establishment in Bogota would never have opposed the drug trade if it had not enabled former punks and small-time hoods to...

I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can’t afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that...

There is no point to samba if it doesn’t make you smile.

Peron had a wise saying. In politics, you can recover from anything except looking like a fool.

I tried to reconstruct just how and why I had stopped dancing years earlier. The turning point for that decision was a six-month sojourn teaching dance in Cuba back in 1970.

I believe in reincarnation and communication with the spirits. But I also believe in the founding principles of Marxism-Leninism. Where is it written that you have to be coherent?

I went to school at a school that doesn’t exist anymore. It was called the Walden School, so you can guess a lot of things from it by the name, right? We were allowed to...

I read a lot. And both of my parents, I think, would have wanted to be writers. It’s funny how one ends up doing the things that-that parents-perhaps, the dreams that parents couldn’t fulfill. I...

A left-wing guerrilla is somebody who belongs to an organization that by now is 30 or 40 years old. There are several guerrilla groups in Colombia, not just one. And they more or less adhere...

I’m an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a...

Translation is a notoriously thankless profession: there is absolutely no money in it; it involves a severe submersion of the self into another; the hours are long and you get about as much recognition for...

And in fact, I dream in whatever language I’m living in. So that, you know, after six months of being in the States, I started dreaming in English again. And when I moved back to...

If you’re going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you’d better die young.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a...

And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the...

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.

What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?