“The black asphalt wouls shimmer with vapors I had a theory about those vapors...not released by the sun but by a huge onion buried under the city. This onion made us cry... I thought about the giant onion, that remarkable bulb of sadness.”

“It appears these days I don't have much of a life because my nose is often stuck in a book. But I discovered that reading builds a life inside the mind.”

“I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.”

“going back and forth, back and forth, getting nowhere”

“Because nothing should be wastedIn a world where sparrows work hardTo prove there is enough.”

“If half an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is good or he is evil.”

“Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”