"Why don’t I feel more at home in English? How is it that the language I learned to read and write in doesn’t comfort me? What happened, and what does it mean? The estrangement, the disenchantment confuses, disturbs me. Ifeel more than ever that I am a writer without a definitive language, without origin, without definition. Whether it’s an advantage or a disadvantage I wouldn’t know."

"In America, although I speak English like a native, although I’m considered an American writer, I meet the same wall but for different reasons. Every so often, because of my name, and my appearance, someone asks me why I chose to write in English rather than in my native language. Those who meet me for the first time—when they see me, then learn my name, then hear theway I speak English—ask me where I’m from. I have to justify the language I speak in, even though I know it perfectly. If I don’t speak, even manyAmericans think I’m a foreigner."

"It’s a book of memory, full of metaphors. It recounts a search, a victory, a continual defeat. Childhood and adulthood, an evolution, maybe a revolution.It’s a book of love, of suffering. It recounts a new independence together with a new dependence. A collaboration, and also a state of solitude.Unlike my other books, this one is rooted in my real, lived experiences.Apart from two stories, it’s not a work of imagination. I consider it a sort of linguistic autobiography, a self-portrait."