"This extraordinary masterwork could only have been written by someone with an academic’s patience and sense of history and tradition. Vastly detailed and rich with anthropological, historical, and cultural information, I refer to this book first anytime I want to learn or better understand anything about Latin cuisine."

"The story of a guy who gives up on society and confines himself in an extravagant estate. He lures a ventriloquist home so can fuck her while she simulates Latin being spoken by two giant stone sphinxes. Also he encrusts a tortoise with so many jewels that the poor thing can’t walk anymore and dies"

"There’s a whole wave of Latin American fiction that I didn’t encounter until later in life. In high school one reads grand narratives like Don Quixote, and Garcia Marquez was the closest to contemporary we got. This felt like watching the movie Ghost World; there’s something very exciting and fun about the quotidian in it."

"I was listening to a lot of Cuban music and salsa, a lot of Latin music. I worked with Selena on the last thing she recorded. And there was a whole series of Celia Cruz records I loved. I did a duet with her for a Jonathan Demme movie, Something Wild. Her early Cuban records were done with a band called Sonora Matancera; those are really great. Instead of going to rock clubs, I would go to Salsa Meets Jazz downtown and the Corso Ballroom uptown to hear salsa bands. There was lots of dancing. I liked the idea that you were dancing to live music, not just DJs, and grew to really love the music. It opened me up to a lot of sentimentality and feelings that maybe didn’t come naturally to me. I decided I wanted to do a salsa record, which I did in the early ’90s. And I did another one a few years after that. It was a little less strictly salsa, but it was still in that vein, and I had a wonderful time with a huge band, [Rei Momo]. We toured everywhere, and a lot of folks in the United States did not like it at all. Oddly, people in Latin America really liked it, but not because it was their music. For a lot of their rockers in Argentina or Mexico, it was like, “He's playing our parents’ music.”"