Yet this is not a novel. It is a faithful transcription of my memories, some of them hazy, others riddled with holes left by the passage of the years, others patched up by time and the filters of experience and distance, and still others, no doubt, completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were.

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 best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I’m completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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