I know publishing it may have dire results, but a tale, like life itself, isn't finished until it is heard by someone with an understanding heart. (I… - Rosario Ferré

Literature is made of many pieces, of a reinterpretation of similar themes, of a recycling of materials. Only the mask exists, and the writer wears it to interpret the manifold possibilities of humanity that exist around him. He learns to be a writer when he can take someone else's mask and make it a part of himself and talk from that mask.

I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world.

…I grew up in Ponce where all our domestic service was black. I always had a lot of contact with them, and to a degree they gave me the kind of love that my family denied me. And so I have that sympathy—or empathy—for la gente de color (people of color), and I cannot help it. However, I do not like to create archetypes. If it is possible to break down a novel into archetypes, it is not a good novel…