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 feel very much a New Yorker.

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 for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income.

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.

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 feel very much a New Yorker.

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 way that conveys the fact that I care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 reporter.

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.

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 United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.

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 started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.

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 your efforts as the telephone repairman.

Language... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone.

Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of.

The words carry their own momentum. A confession in motion tends to stay in motion. Newton's first law of jealousy.

I always like a woman in power in politics. I think they're pretty inspirational in terms of looks to begin with. It's very calculated.

I'm an e-mail junkie though I'm trying to read my in-box only twice a day and to answer all at once.

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer.

Parties that win elections should form the government, not parties that lose elections.

The ancient Jewish people gave the world the vision of eternal peace, of universal disarmament, of abolishing the teaching and learning of war.

The people of South Carolina support conservatives who are trying to push real change, and the people of South Carolina expect their presidential candidates to back them up when they show courage.

You can think all you can but don't publicize all your thoughts.

It is helpful to know the proper way to behave so one can decide whether or not to be proper.

Isolation doesn't bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security.

You will encounter many distractions and many temptations to put your goal aside The security of a job a wife who wants kids whatever. But if you hang in there always following your vision I have no doubt you will succeed.

Happy songs are very difficult to write. How many truly great upbeat songs are there?

I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.

I'd much rather be liked because people realize that I'm standing up for myself.

We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.

I'm not sure I'd write a good cookbook, but I might make a good cooking show.

If a teacher does not involve himself, his values, his commitments, in the course of discussion, why should the students?

Sometimes I think that a parody of democracy could be more dangerous than a blatant dictatorship, because that gives people an opportunity to avoid doing anything about it.

I want to get up there and tell entertaining stories but that are also to a certain extent clean.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

My best year I made $25,000. Of course, that was back in the '70s.

Who's to say where funny stops and 'too far' starts?