"I am dead, my king," I wrote to you, meaning that defeat had overtaken me, even before the battle at Actium. "I am de…"

"Everything was bound to change, I realized, when I started to imagine and couldn't stop imagining that the virulent o…"

"if the novel has a power, it’s to touch that consciousness behind words, or before words. There is a kind of poet tha…"

"They [novels] are a vice. It’s a vice so big that I cannot keep it hidden. I love to tell stories. I love to tell sto…"

"If we don’t fight for spaces of tolerance and civility, Mexico could become a doomed country, marked by intolerance a…"

"The experience of love led me to poetry—I fell in love and I discovered what had been missing from my poems—; friends…"

"Women are not entirely excluded from public life and positions of power, but there is still a lot of work to be done …"

"I read the poems quickly, drinking them up, gulping them down, as if to get drunk. Poetry recharges my batteries. Whe…"

"I never feel that I have to be true to history: I have to be true to my story, so that it holds up. My novels use his…"

"After reading documents and historical treatises, I began to write the novel, and this, for me, is a craft not unlike…"