Because the completion of labour service was a precondition for permission to study at the university, I was able to begin my studies of Germanistics and Classical Philology during the summer term of 1939.

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

Humor is really one of the hardest things to define, very hard. And it's very ambiguous. You have it, or you don't. You can't attain it.

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

I'm a Queens boy at the end of the day.

I do a lot of yoga, and when I'm in L.A., I have an outdoorsy sort of lifestyle. It's sort of comfortable, West Coast, yoga chic.

I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.

Hispanic' was the term adopted by the government - by the Nixon government in particular - and that made the community feel it was being branded.