Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

I believe in books that do not go to a ready-made public. I'm looking for readers I would like to make. To win them, to create readers rather than to give something that readers are expecting. That would bore me to death.

One puts off the biography like you put off death. To write an autobiography is to etch the words on your own gravestone.

The United States has written the white history of the United States. It now needs to write the black, Latino, Indian, Asian and Caribbean history of the United States.

Like all of Latin America, Mexico after independence in 1821 turned its back on a triple heritage: on the Spanish heritage, because we were newly liberated colonies, and on our Indian and black heritages, because we considered them backward and barbaric. We looked towards France, England and the U.S., to become progressive democratic republics.

I am not interested in slice of life, what I want is a slice of the imagination.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.