"Myths die hard. We humans define ourselves by the ideological teams we join. We are liberals or conservatives, Christians or atheists, Yankee fans or Red Sox fans. We filter facts to conform to our group’s ideology and then defend that ideology to the death. Only a truly momentous event can make us change teams…"

"I wrote the play in English because I wanted non-Latinos to see it. I tried to draw Americans into the world of the play and to have them realize that, but for an accident at birth, they, too, might have found themselves crossing a terrible desert in search of a better life…"

"My play attempts to put a human face on the immigration debate. It argues that the undocumented Mexican worker and the American working man have more in common with each other than they do with the businessmen and politicians who profit from their plight…"

"It was a challenge to always be a Latino to Whites, but a Cubano to L.A.’s Chicanos. I was married to a woman for awhile and no one asked about my sexual behavior; but when I came out, it’s often the number one question asked by journalists, which I find insulting as it distorts the purpose of the interview. This notion that I must somehow be sleeping with anyone famous [he’s not] is too much about my private life."

"It’s the duty of the playwright to sneak in as many effronteries as he can. If you act completely effrontive to people, they’ll never go listen. So you gotta sneak it past them…"

"There’s always somebody in my plays who’s the outsider looking in. And when you don’t fit into the family structure, you’re the outsider. And the more fascistic a country is, the more that it wants to punish the outsider…"

"To perceive Latin people as menial workers, with some sort of underground element. Not to see people as individuals, to always see people in terms of their racial group. That’s who you’re fighting all the time; that’s who you’re fighting in theater, as well…"

"Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright."

"Having a play directed by someone else is like going to a religious school when you’re a child, you listen and obey…"

"My plays are clean. Most plays have four, five vital moments in the play and the rest of the play is just getting to it. It’s just fill. I don’t know why, whether it’s just to create the sense that it’s real or that you have to spend two hours to experience the power (you have to see not just snapshots). But I find it very boring. I go to sleep when I see plays like that, and I go to sleep writing it…"

"Art is something you don’t just reproduce—what you see everyday doesn’t seem to be inspiring to them. But you do something with it so that it’s not bound by the law of reality. My work has always had that influence. I’ve never felt that it was necessary at all to write realistic plays…"

"I never keep a fixed schedule. I like to write for a while, move around, read, drink something, come back. But when I’ve entered the world of the novel, that demands more concentration. It’s hard to even write a letter, because it means leaving that world. To put aside the typewriter and take out letter paper, or stop because you have to pay the phone bill, is terrible…"

"In exile one is nothing but a ghost ... I ceased to exist when I went into exile."

"The writer has a fundamental responsibility to write well or to write the best he can, because if he doesn’t he’s not a writer. And when a writer writes, he’s always referring to a social and historical context…"

"I’ve always been very interested in the short story. Compared to the often exhausting world of the novel, the short story offers a quicker reward, and there’s something appealing about its greater spontaneity…"