"It is my habit when I travel to whatever country I am going to try to take along a copy of my book in that a language as a kind of a second passport. And that has really proved valuable. What really happened was I said I was a writer and all of that, and she asked what I might have written that she could have read. I said the most popular was Corazon de Vajhe. She broke into this big grin and embraced me. A kind of little miracle. I thought that maybe she knew the movie. She didn't say. But no, the books get around. It was popular in Mexico and Perdita Durango was enormously popular, and so what you find out being a writer and being published in other languages is that there really is a global readership as well as a global economy and some of us do much better in foreign countries than we do in our own. And that's okay."
Barry Gifford interviewed by Robert Birnbaum.