“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 to a Maoist or a traditional Cuban approach to revolution.”
“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 Mexico, after a few months, I started dreaming in Spanish again.”
“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 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.”
“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 know that my mother would have been beyond herself to have had a story published in The New Yorker.”
“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.”
“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. But the level or horror that some of us had to cover as reporters working in Latin America was pretty hard to describe at points. And it has changed.”