The impersonality of the written word made it the easiest means of exchange...

Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers – persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions – the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them – have all treated my parents with condescension.

Of course, since we don’t see the Indian as a living figure – having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory – we can’t see the Indian among us.

You don’t know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.

It is very curious that the United States and Canada both assume that diversity means only race and ethnicity. They never assume it might mean more Nazis, or more Southern Baptists. That’s diversity too, you know.

Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family’s language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

I don’t think writers should be convenient examples. I don’t think we should make people feel settled. I don’t try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that.

I’ve once gotten in trouble with certain gay activists because I’m not gay enough! I am a morose homosexual. I’m melancholy. Gay is the last adjective I would use to describe myself. The idea of being gay, like a little sparkler, never occurs to me. So if you ask me if I’m gay, I say no.

I became a writer not because my father was one – my father made false teeth for a living. I became a writer because the Irish nuns who educated me taught me something about bravery with their willingness to give so much to me.

My grandmother would always tell me that I was hers, that I was Mexican. That was her role. It was not my teacher’s role to tell me I was Mexican. It was my teacher’s role to tell me I was an American.