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[donald] Trump Is Explained With The Intersection Of A Number Of Things: Our Economic Crisis, The Way It's Easier To Blame Immigrants, With The Happenstance That He Discovered That By Bashing Latino Immigrants And Characterizing Them As "rapists" And "murderers" And "scumbags," Suddenly He's Got This Groundswell Of Support From A Group Of People Who Were Raised On This Vocabulary.

-Junot Diaz

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[donald] Trump Is Explained

Junot Diaz

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[donald] Trump Is Explained With The Intersection Of A Number Of Things: Our Economic Crisis, The Way It's Easier To Blame Immigrants, With The Happenstance That He Discovered That By Bashing Latino Immigrants And Characterizing Them As "rapists" And "murderers" And "scumbags," Suddenly He's Got This Groundswell Of Support From A Group Of People Who Were Raised On This Vocabulary.

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I Never Hear White Writers Get Asked, 'do You Worry About How You Represent White People?'

Because I Can't Seem To Escape It. It's A Way For Me To Address And Counter My Questions About What It Means To Be Human, Or, In My Case A Dominican Human Who Grew Up In New Jersey.

The Thing Is - Do We Really Need Another Writer Who Writes A Book Every Eighteen Months, Whether The Quality Is Wonderful Or Not? I Mean, Maybe. But I Can Name Twenty Off The Top Of My Head Who Do It. Maybe What We Need Is A Writer Like Me Who Goes Very Slow, As Well.

Well, When You Look At A Lot Of Science Fiction Novels They're Asking Questions About Power. There Are Questions About What It Means To Have Power And What Are The Long-term Consequences Of Power.

Asking Questions

As Artists We Are Here To Make You Uncomfortable With The Complexity Of Your Reality.

I Prefer The 1950s Where People Were Like, "i'm A White Supremacist, And That's Who I Am." Now People Want To Burn A Cross On Your Lawn And Call Themselves Not Racists.

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

It Might Interest You That Just As The U.s. Was Ramping Up Its Involvement In Vietnam, Lbj Launched An Illegal Invasion Of The Dominican Republic (april 28, 1965). (santo Domingo Was Iraq Before Iraq Was Iraq.)

Artists Are Not Cheerleaders, And We're Not The Heads Of Tourism Boards. We Expose And Discuss What Is Problematic, What Is Contradictory, What Is Hurtful And What Is Silenced In The Culture We're In.

The World Should Always Be Concerned Whenever A Vast Human Rights Violation Occurs Anywhere On The Planet.

Each Morning, Before Jackie Started Her Studies, She Wrote On A Clean Piece Of Paper: Tarde Venientibus Ossa. To The Latecomers Are Left The Bones.

I Think A Lot Of The Most Interesting Immigrant Writing Involves Stepping Outside Of That Old, Dreary Binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker Is A Great Example. Same Goes For Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

Success, After All, Loves A Witness, But Failure Can't Exist Without One.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men. There's A Sense Among Many Writers Of Color That The Most Invisible Figure That Was Sitting Between All Of Us Was The Nerd. But It Was The Thing We Weren't Saying, That People Were Afraid To Say, Like, "yo, What We Do Is Nerdy By Definition."

For Me It's A Remarkable Thing That There Is A Prize Celebrating And Honouring And Making For A Brief Moment Short Fiction The Centre Of The Literary Universe.

I Seem To Enjoy Telling Stories With A Central Absence, With A Lacuna Tunnelled Into Them.

My Art Feels Like It's Real Disobedient. I Can Fill Notebooks With Observations And Maybe They Find Their Way Into The Work Unconsciously, Which Is Great. I've Never Been Able To Directly Plug, Like To Take A Little Snip That I've Picked Up On The Street And Transfer It Into A Story. I Don't Know What's Wrong, But It Never Works That Way.

I Write For The People I Grew Up With. I Took Extreme Pains For My Book To Not Be A Native Informant. Not: 'this Is Dominican Food. This Is A Spanish Word.' I Trust My Readers, Even Non-spanish Ones.

Cities Produce Love And Yet Feel None. A Strange Thing When You Think About It, But Perhaps Fitting. Cities Need That Love More Than Most Of Us Care To Imagine. Cities, After All, For All Their Massiveness, All Their There-ness, Are Acutely Vulnerable.

When People Are Always Telling You That You Have To Have A Lot Of Women, Women Are Very Important, There's A Chance That You Might Actually Begin To Observe Them On A More Fundamental Level. Then You Get So Much Focus That One Day You Might Actually See. Dominican Men Are Told To Look At Women All The Time, But They're Definitely Not Told To See Them.

What Else She Doesn't Know: That The Man Next To Her Would End Up Being Her Husband And The Father Of Her Two Children, That After Two Years Together He Would Leave Her, Her Third And Final Heartbreak, And She Would Never Love Again.

The Body Is What Reminds Us On A Daily Basis That We're Human. The Body Defies Us, It Betrays Us, We Have To Struggle With It, You Know. And It Reveals In Curious And In Abiding Ways How We Are Not Perfect.

Used To Be In The Old Days, Only The Pulp Writers Wrote Like Machines. Now Everybody Is Expected To Be Literary John Henrys. So In That Context Someone Like Me Is An Anomaly.

Just The Fact That You Get To Live And Breathe And Interact With The World - That's Pretty Marvelous.

I Was Really Drawn To Thinking About The Women In My Life. Thinking About My Mother, Who's A Very Powerful Force On Me. And I Have These Two Very Strong Sisters Who Took Up A Lot Of Imaginary Space In My Life.

You Really Want To Know What Being An X-man Feels Like? Just Be A Smart Bookish Boy Of Color In A Contemporary U.s. Ghetto. Mamma Mia! Like Having Bat Wings Or A Pair Of Tentacles Growing Out Of Your Chest.

That’s Life For You. All The Happiness You Gather To Yourself, It Will Sweep Away Like It’s Nothing. If You Ask Me I Don’t Think There Are Any Such Things As Curses. I Think There Is Only Life. That’s Enough.

Katrina Was One Of Those Things That Rips The Clothes Off Of The Guy Who Keeps Saying He's A Saint, And Underneath You See That He's A Monster.

There's A Long-term Tradition Of White Supremacy In This Country. [donald] Trump Isn't Something Entirely New. But Then There Is The Crisis For White Supremacy In This Country Now Where You Have People Of Color Standing Up For Themselves In Ways That They've Never Stood Up For Themselves Or At Least Standing Up For Themselves In A Generational, Novel Way.

I Was Neither Black Enough For The Black Kids Or Dominican Enough For The Dominican Kids. I Didn't Have A Safe Category.

There Is A Lot Of Scepticism Today As To Whether Memoir Is Real. But When Fiction Is Done At A Certain Level There Is Scepticism As To Whether It Is Really Fiction.

Poor Oscar. Without Even Realizing It He'd Fallen Into One Of Those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, The Bane Of Nerdboys Everywhere. These Relationships Were Love's Version Of A Stay In The Stocks, In You Go, Plenty Of Misery Guaranteed And What You Got Out Of It Besides Bitterness And Heartbreak Nobody Knows. Perhaps Some Knowledge Of Self And Women.

We Hide So Well. This Is The Bottom Line: How Hidden Is Male Subjectivity? Name Five Books Where Male Subjectivity Is Produced In An Honest Way.

My Novel, Which I Had Started With Such Hope Shortly After Publishing My First Book Of Stories, Wouldn't Budge Past The 75-page Mark. Nothing I Wrote Past Page 75 Made Any Kind Of Sense. Nothing. Which Would Have Been Fine If The First 75 Pages Hadn't Been Pretty Damn Cool.

Clavo Saca Clavo. Nothing Sacas Nothing, You Reply. No One Will Ever Be Like Her.

I Am A Person Who Dreads Any Kind Of Public Exposure And Any Kind Of Public Event. I Spend All Day, If I Have To Do A Reading, Preparing.

This Is What I Know: People's Hopes Go On Forever.

I Always Think About Myself As A Writer; That Comes Out Of Being A Reader First, And I Don't Think I Kind Of Got To Really Playing With Language In Any Formal Way Probably Until I Was In My Mid-twenties.

I Know For A Fact That - It's Just The Way Our Biases Work Now In The Industry Of Literature, But Certainly A Short Story Collection Does Not Receive The Same Kind Of Attention As A Novel.

We're On Speaking Terms Today. I Say, Maybe We Should Hang Out With The Boys, And You Shake Your Head. I Want To Spend Time With You, You Say. If We're Still Good, Next Week Maybe. That's The Most We Can Hope For. Nothing Thrown, Nothing Said That We Might Remember For Years. You Watch Me While You Put A Brush Through Your Hair. Each Strand That Breaks Is As Long As My Arm. You Don't Want To Let Go, But Don't Want To Be Hurt, Either. It's Not A Great Place To Be But What Can I Tell You?

And That's When I Know It's Over. As Soon As You Start Thinking About The Beginning, It's The End.

You Need To Learn How To Walk The World, He Told Me. There's A Lot Out There.

Now People Like Susan Sarandon Are Noticing That People Of Color Live This Way?! This Is The Way I've Always Lived! What's Happened Is That It Has Now Reached A Level Of National Discourse Where It's On The Table. But They've Never Minded That We Were Treated Like This Off-stage.

Books Don't Live And Die By Awards. You Don't Listen To An Hector Lavoe Album Because It Won Some Awards.

My Father Was A Little League Dictator. That Really Affected Me, His Control-freakery, His Impunity, His Arbitrary Unreasonable Power.

She Smelled Like Herself, Like The Wind Through A Tree.

You Know How It Is When You Get Back With Somebody You’ve Loved. It Felt Better Than It Ever Was, Better Than It Ever Could Be Again

Of Course We All Know That's Not How Life Works. The Novel That Is Our Life Can End At Any Time. Sometimes Even On Page One.

When I Was Thinking About These Women Characters, No Matter How Bad A Person I Am - A Bad Writer, My Limitations, My Sexism, You Know - The Thought Was, It Would Be Useful As A Writer To Try To Create A Template For All The Male Writers, Especially Dominican Male Writers, Especially Males Of Color, Of How A Writer Can Use Seeing To Create More Nuanced Representations Of Women.

Literature Is Less Involved In Giving You Answers And More Dedicated To Giving You Insight.

I'm Really Into The Rights Of Immigrants, The Rights Of The Working Poor. I'm One Of Those Little Activist Types. I Probably Would Have Just Gone To Law School. And The Scary Part Is That I Was One Of Those Kids Who Always Tested Really Well. You Put A Test In Front Of Me, And I Would Have Been Like Do-do-do-do-do. I Probably Would Have Been Some Community Lawyer Somewhere - If Anything, That's Probably What I Would Have Been Doing.

It's Just A Matter Of Willpower. The Day You Decide It's Over, It's Over. You Never Get Over It.

For A Long Time, I Let My Mother Say What She Wanted About Me, And What Was Worse, For A Long Time I Believed Her.

The People I Know Who Would Support [donald] Trump Are Keeping Their Mouths Shut.

In Minority Communities There's A Sensitivity, Often A Knee-jerk Reaction, To Critical Representations. There's A Misunderstanding Of What An Artist Does.

I Was, As A Kid, Really Obsessed With Reading... That Was About As Geeky As You Could Possibly Get.

Like Most Lit Nerds, I'm A Voracious Reader. I Never Got Enough Poetry Under My Belt Growing Up But I Do Read It - Some Of My Favorites, Gina Franco And Angela Shaw And Cornelius Eady And Kevin Young, Remind Me Daily That Unless The Words Sing And Dance, What's The Use Of Putting Them Down On Paper.

...sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

In Order To Write The Book You Want To Write, In The End You Have To Become The Person You Need To Become To Write That Book.

The Whole Culture Is Telling You To Hurry, While The Art Tells You To Take Your Time. Always Listen To The Art.

I Was In Fact Pretty Much - By The Larger Culture, By The Local Culture, By People Around Me, By People On Tv - Encouraged To Imagine Women As Something Slightly Inferior To Men.

That Was The Summer When Everything We Would Become Was Hovering Just Over Our Heads.

Sadness At Being Caught, At The Incontrovertibe Knowledge That She Will Never Forgive You.

I Can See Myself Watching Him Shave Every Morning. And At Other Time I See Us In That House And See How One Bright Day (or A Day Like This, So Cold Your Mind Shifts Every Time The Wind Does) He Will Wake Up And Decide It's All Wrong. I'm Sorry, He'll Say. I Have To Leave Now.

I've Been Trying To Write. I Also Spent A Lot Of Time On Different Campuses, In Conversation, Helping Other Writers. That's What I Do: I Teach Them Writing.

But Back Then, In Those First Days, I Was So Alone That Every Day Was Like Eating My Own Heart.

I Act Most Like Myself... When I'm In My Hometown, Santo Domingo. I Try To Get There About Five Times A Year.

Even If You Didn't Come From Another Country, The Idea Of How Do You Make A Home Somewhere New Is Common To Anyone Who's Either Going To College, Shifting Towns.

As An Artist You're On A Journey Of Discovery And Sometimes That Journey Takes A Long Time, Doesn't Subscribe To [a] Train Schedule, To The Punch-clock. And I Need To Read A Lot To Make My Pages Happen.

You Can't Find Intimacy - You Can't Find Home - When You're Always Hiding Behind Masks. Intimacy Requires A Certain Level Of Vulnerability. It Requires A Certain Level Of You Exposing Your Fragmented, Contradictory Self To Someone Else. You Running The Risk Of Having Your Core Self Rejected And Hurt And Misunderstood.

Students Teach All Sorts Of Things But Most Importantly They Make Explicit The Courage That It Takes To Be A Learner, The Courage It Takes To Open Yourself To The Transformative Power Of Real Learning And That Courage I Am Exposed To Almost Every Day At Mit And That I'm Deeply Grateful For.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

I Discovered Early That As An Artist There Was Absolutely Nothing Wrong With Being Surrounded By People Who Were Not Dedicated To Your Field.

It Was Like Being At The Bottom Of An Ocean, She Said. There Was No Light And A Whole Ocean Crushing Down On You. But Most People Had Gotten So Used To It They Thought It Normal, They Forgot Even That There Was A World Above.

As A Dominican Man, You're Socialized To Be A Playboy. You Spend A Lot Of Time Being Taught That Women Are Important, But Without The Really Positive Framework Of Why. You Figure Out Quickly It's Because Of Culo (ass). But There Is A Sense That It's Not That Simple.

I Love The Kookiness Of Our Speech. Speech Is Like Wonderful Magic And Poetry In Itself. I've Always Had To Crib A Lot From What I've Heard.

God Bless Perseverance. Because It's Not Easy.

Love Is The Great Test Of The Human. The Human Is Tested By Our Ability To Withstand Love. Love Is So Difficult, It Is So Challenging, It Demands Of Us That We Wreck It With Ourselves. It Demands Of Us An Honesty That Few Of Us Could Sustain.

I Mean, The Nation In Which We Live - And The World In Which We Live - Is So Extraordinarily More Like A Future Than The Futures That We're Being Sold On The Screen And On Television.

[donald] Trump Is What Happens In America Every Time It Feels Economically And Politically Threatened, And It Encounters The Limitations Of Its Own White Supremacists Practices.

Part Of It Is Eight Years Of A Black President, And White America Still Lost Their [minds] About That. Part Of It Is A Republican Politics Of Vicious, Vicious Partisan [stuff] That Has Completely Poisoned What We Would Call The Political Rhetorical Sphere. All Of These Things Come Together In A Perfect Storm.

I'm One Of Those Apocalyptics. From The Start Of My Immigrant Days, I've Been Fascinated By End-of-the-world Stories, By Outbreak Narratives, And Always Wanted To Set A World-ender On Hispaniola.

When I Was Working On 'drown' - This Was Way Back In The Mid-'90s - I Had This Idea That I Wanted To Do Another Collected Stories. I Wanted To Do Another Book Like 'drown' That Focused Specifically On Infidelity.

Nobody Likes Children, Your Mother Assured You. That Doesn't Mean You Don't Have Them.

Dominican Men Are Told To Look At Women All The Time, But They're Definitely Not Told To See Them.

...one Of Those Very Bad Men That Not Even Postmodernism Can Explain Away.

The Caribbean Is Such An Apocalyptic Place, Whether It's The Decimation Of The Indigenous Populations By The Europeans, Whether It's The Importation Of Slaves And Their Subsequent Being Worked To Death By The Millions In Many Ways, Whether It's The Immigrant Processes Which Began For Many People, New Worlds Ending Their Old Ones.

I Write Very, Very Slowly, And For Me, I Have To Summon All Sorts Of Resources To Make One Of These Pieces Work.

So The Kind Of Boy I Was, Or That I Was Told To Be, You Were Kind Of This Like Half-gladiator, Half-dude Who, You Know, Was Supposed To Have As Many Girls As Possible And Work Until Your Heart Exploded, Have No Fear, You Know.

You Must Learn Her. You Must Know The Reason Why She Is Silent. You Must Trace Her Weakest Spots. You Must Write To Her. You Must Remind Her That You Are There. You Must Know How Long It Takes For Her To Give Up. You Must Be There To Hold Her When She Is About To. You Must Love Her Because Many Have Tried And Failed. And She Wants To Know That She Is Worthy To Be Loved, That She Is Worthy To Be Kept. And, This Is How You Keep Her.

The Idea That America Has Cornered The Market On Anti-immigration Is Ridiculous. It's A Global Phenomenon.

Every Time You Hear Anyone Talk About The Caribbean, Whether It's Caribbeans Themselves Or People Outside, There's Always Talk About Women's Bodies. Talk About This Voluptuousness, This Kind Of Stereotype Of What A Caribbean Person Is. And I Think These Are Stereotypes That Even People Inside The Culture, We Actually Sometimes Claim Them And We're Very Proud.

We're Accepted As Long As We Conform To What We Are Expected To Be, And I'm Sure That's Not Any Different For Anyone Else.

Being An Author Is Always Like Being A Well-run Dictatorship - It's All One Person Speaking.

John Carter Was Also One Of Our First Recognizable Superhumans And There Is Little Doubt That His Extraordinary Physical Feats Inspired Superman's Creators. Remember: Before Superman Could Fly Or Turn Back Time, He Was Nothing Less Than An Earthbound Crime-fighting John Carter In Tights.

Sometimes You Just Have To Try, Even If You Know It Won’t Work.

The Art Is Just Really Mysterious. If I Understood It More, Maybe I Would Write More.

My Greatest Responsibility Is To Acknowledge The Mistakes And The Shortcomings Of The Country In Which I Live, To Acknowledge My Privileges, And To Try To Make It A Better Place.

When I Write, What I Long For Is Not More Realism Or Fiction But More Courage. That's What I Always Find Myself Short On And What I Have To Struggle To Achieve In Order That The Work Might Live.

...and When He Thought About The Way She Laughed, As Though She Owned The Air Around Her, His Heart Thundered Inside His Chest, A Lonely Rada.

I Don't Think You Can Be From The Caribbean And Not Know A Certain Amount About The Apocalypse.

I'm Part Of The People Who Are More Neutral. I'm Just Waiting For The Dust To Settle So That We Can Turn Our Guns Against The Republicans.

For Kind Of Sophisticated Art I'm Interested In, The Larger Structural Rebuke Has To Be So Subtle That It Has To Be Distributed At An Almost Sub-atomic Level. Otherwise, You Fall Into The Kind Of Preachy, Moralistic Fable That I Don't Think Makes For Good Literature.

A Form Wherein We Can Enjoy Simultaneously What Is Best In Both The Novel And The Short Story Form. My Plan Was To Create A Book That Affords Readers Some Of The Novel's Long-form Pleasures But That Also Contains The Short Story's Ability To Capture What Is So Difficult About Being Human - The Brevity Of Our Moments, Their Cruel Irrevocability.

I Feel Most Like Myself... After I Run - I Go Out For Five Miles Every Morning.

Mexico City Is The Center Of Art And Culture And Politics And Has Been And Continues To Be For Latin America In A Way That I Think Really Called To Me As An Artistic Person, As Someone That Was Interested In The Politics Of Latin America, You Know. God, Every Single Famous Person In Latin American History And Art And Politics Seems To Have Found Their Way To Mexico City.

The Only Difference Between A Published And Unpublished Writer Is A Tolerance For Imperfection.

It Wasn't That I Couldn't Write. I Wrote Every Day. I Actually Worked Really Hard At Writing. At My Desk By 7 A.m., Would Work A Full Eight And More. Scribbled At The Dinner Table, In Bed, On The Toilet, On The No. 6 Train, At Shea Stadium. I Did Everything I Could. But None Of It Worked.

Ybon Was The One Who Suggested Calling The Wait Something Else. Yeah, Like What? Maybe, She Said, You Could Call It Life.

She Would Be A New Person, She Vowed. They Said No Matter How Far A Mule Travels It Can Never Come Back A Horse, But She Would Show Them All.

One Of The Many Characteristics Of The New Is That, At First, It's Very Hard To Recognize It For What It Is. We're Lucky If We Recognize Something As Being New When It First Appears. Usually I Think We Don't Have That Privilege. It's Usually After The Fact That We Suddenly Turn Around And Say, 'wow, This Thing Is Amazing.'

Ana Iris Once Asked Me If I Loved Him And I Told Her About The Lights In My Old Home In The Capital, How They Flickered And You Never Knew If They Would Go Out Or Not. You Put Down Your Things And You Waited And Couldn't Do Anything Really Until The Lights Decided. This, I Told Her, Is How I Feel.

I Always Had A Sense That I Would Fall In Love With Tokyo. In Retrospect I Guess It's Not That Surprising. I Was Of The Generation That Had Grown Up In The '80s When Japan Was Ascendant (born Aloft By A Bubble Whose Burst Crippled Its Economy For Decades), And I'd Fed On A Steady Diet Of Anime And Samurai Films.

Falling In Love

Art Is Not Boosterism, It's Not Propaganda, And It's Not Spin, But That's Not Something That Art Does, And Nor Has It Historically Ever Done It.

[donald] Trump Is Taking America's Dirty Laundry To The Center Stage. Everything He Does, The Rest Of The Country Already Does Really Well: Victimize Immigrants, Poor People, Women.

I Think One Of The Paradoxes Of Writing Fiction Is When People Enjoy It, They Want It To Be Real. So They Look For Connections.

In Another Universe I Probably Came Out Ok, Ended Up With Mad Novias And Jobs And A Sea Of Love In Which To Swim, But In This World I Had A Brother Who Was Dying Of Cancer And A Long Dark Patch Of Life Like A Mile Of Black Ice Waiting For Me Up Ahead.

Any Art Worth Its Name Requires You To Be Fundamentally Lost For A Very Long Time.

And Because Love, Real Love, Is Not So Easily Shed.

As For My Slowness As A Writer - That's Been A Struggle, No Question. We Live In A Culture That Values And Rewards Machine-speed Productivity. Even The Arts Are Expected To Conform To The Taylor Model Of Productivity.

The Truth Is There Ain’t No Relationship In The World That Doesn’t Hit Turbulence.

The Half-life Of Love Is Forever.

- Nothing Else Has Any Efficacy, I Might As Well Be Myself. - But Your Yourself Sucks! - It Is, Lamentably, All I Have.

You Were At The Age Where You Could Fall In Love With A Girl Over An Expression, Over A Gesture

Falling In Love

I Wring My Hands Because I Know That As A Dude, My Privilege, My Long-term Deficiencies Work Against Me In Writing Women, No Matter How Hard I Try And How Talented I Am.

You Think People Hate A Fat Person? Try A Fat Person Who's Trying To Get Thin.

You Keep Waiting For The Heaviness To Leave You. You Keep Waiting For The Moment You Never Think About The Ex Again. It Doesn't Come.

If You Didn't Grow Up Like I Did Then You Don't Know, And If You Don't Know It's Probably Better You Don't Judge.

You're Dominican Only If You Do This, This, And That. And If You Do This And That, You'll Be Accepted To A Certain Degree And If You Don't, People Will Scorn You For It.

She Was The Kind Of Girlfriend God Gives You Young, So You'll Know Loss The Rest Of Your Life.

There Are A Couple Of Strategies For Writing About An Absence Or Writing About A Loss. One Can Create The Person That Was Lost, Develop The Character Of The Fiancee. There's Another Strategy That One Can Employ, Maybe Riskier... Make The Reader Suffer The Loss Of The Character In A More Literal Way.

We All Have A Blind Spot And It's Shaped Exactly Like Us.

If You Were A Nerd Computer Geek In 1982, The Amount Of Isolation You Felt - At Least What I Experienced, Or The Kids I Knew, The Isolation They Felt - Was Almost Total. They Were Not Part Of Society; No One Thought They Were Cool.

We Get These Lives For Free. I Didn't Do Anything To Get This Life, And No Matter What The Hardships Are, It Is Free And, In A Way, It's An Extraordinary Bargain.

To Produce That Identity Among Young People Required Guinea Pigs.

Genre Might Certainly Increase Some Of Your Narrative Freedoms, But It Also Diminishes Others. That's The Nature Of Genre.

If You're A Status Quo Writer, You're Considered To Not Be Political But That's As Political As If You're A Progressive Writer. Some Politics Are Asked To Show Their Passports And Others Aren't. In The Dominican Republique, If You're Slightly Progressive, People Have A Lot Of Suspicions That You're Up To Some Sort Of Conspiracy, That This Is Some Sort Of Plot. On The Other Hand, If You're Conservative And Mainstream, People Tend To Take That As A Given And Don't Notice The Politics.

I Always Individuate Myself From Other Writers Who Say They Would Die If They Couldn't Write. For Me, I'd Die If I Couldn't Read.

Nilda Is Watching The Ground As Though She's Afraid She Might Fall. My Heart Is Beating And I Think, We Could Do Anything. We Could Marry. We Could Drive Off To The West Coast. We Could Start Over. It's All Possible But Neither Of Us Speaks For A Long Time And The Moment Closes And We're Back In The World We've Always Known.

I Write Incredibly Slowly. And, On Top Of That, I Spent My Entire Youth And Twenties Working Like A Dog, So One Of The Things That Happened When I Finished Drown Was That I Got Busy Living. I'd Never Travelled, I'd Never Seen Anything. So I Did As Much Travelling As My Job Teaching Would Allow.

I'm An Immigrant And I Will Stay An Immigrant Forever.

We Know Story Collections End When They End, As Well - The Pages Serving As A Countdown - But Nevertheless The Standard Story Anthology Hews Closer To What Makes Being Human So Hard: It Reminds You With Each Story How Quickly Everything We Are, Everything We Call Our Lives Can Change, Can Be Upended, Can Disappear. Never To Return.

It's Never The Changes We Want That Change Everything.

But If These Years Have Taught Me Anything It Is This: You Can Never Run Away. Not Ever. The Only Way Out Is In.

It Took Me Sixteen Years To Write.

Instead Of Lowering Your Head And Copping To It Like A Man, You Pick Up The Journal As One Might Hold A Bady's Beshattered Diaper, As One Might Pinch A Recently Benutted Condom. You Glance At The Offending Passages. Then You Look At Her And Smile A Smile Your Dissembling Face Will Remember Until The Day You Die. Baby, You Say, Baby, This Is Part Of My Novel. This Is How You Lose Her.

I've Always Thought That You Don't Love A Country By Turning A Blind Eye To Its Crimes And To A Problem. The Way That You Love A Country Is By Seeing Everything That It's Done Wrong, All Of Its Mistakes, And Still Thinking That It's Beautiful And That It's Worthy.

Sucks To Be Left Out Of Adolescence, Sort Of Like Getting Locked In The Closet On Venus When The Sun Appears For The First Time In A Hundred Years.

Anger Has A Way Of Returning.

For My First Three Books The Setting (or Place If You Will) Has Always Been A Given - N.j. And The Dominican Republic And Some N.y.c. - So From One Perspective You Could Say That The Place In My Work Always Comes First.

You Ask Everybody You Know: How Long Does It Usually Take To Get Over It? There Are Many Formulas. One Year For Every Year You Dated. Two Years For Every Year You Dated. It's Just A Matter Of Will Power: The Day You Decide It's Over, It's Over. You Never Get Over It.

Stereotypes, They're Sensual, Cultural Weapons. That's The Way That We Attack People. At An Artistic Level, Stereotypes Are Terrible Writing.

This Country Wants To Live In The Illusion That It Is Tolerant But Also Wants To Be Able To Practice Intolerance.

I Guess It's True What They Say: If You Wait Long Enough Everything Changes.

You Said I Could Call You When I Wanted But That You Wouldn’t Call Me. You Have To Decide Where And When, You Said. If You Leave It Up To Me I’ll Want To See You Every Day. At Least You Were Honest, Which Is More Than I Can Say For Me.

Personally I Always Feel Like I Could Use A Little More Of Poetry Apothegmatic Power In My Own Work But We're Always Lacking Something.

Lacking Something

If You Really Want A Prize, Or If You Really Want Applause, You Should Try To Write As Many Books As Humanly Possible.

I Know A Number Of People Who - From The Comments They Make - Are Going To Vote For [donald] Trump When That Curtain Closes. But Let's Keep It Real Honest Here: They Are Voting For A Xenophobic, Anti-latino White Supremacist - Don't Try To Pretty It Up. This Is Now The Age When People Want To Be White Supremacists, But They Don't Actually Want To Be Known For It.

In Fact, Looking At The Darkest Sides Of The United States Has Only Made Me Appreciate The Things That We Do Right, The Things That We Do Beautifully. We Are, For All Of Our Mistakes And All Of Our Crimes, A Remarkable Place.

In The End, All Worlds, Whether They're Set In The Future Or In New Jersey Of Today, Are Fictions. Sure, You Don't Got To Do Too Much Work To Build A Mundane World, But Don't Get It Twisted: You Still Got To Do Some Work.

She's Applying Her Lipstick; I've Always Believed That The Universe Invented The Color Red Solely For Latinas.

Know That In This World There's Somebody Who Will Always Love You.

People Are Always Fascinated By Infidelity Because, In The End - Whether We've Had Direct Experience Or Not - There's Part Of You That Knows There's Absolutely No More Piercing Betrayal. People Are Undone By It.

In The Months That Follow You Bend To The Work, Because It Feels Like Hope, Like Grace--and Because You Know In Your Lying Cheater's Heart That Sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

I Love “the Autobiography Of Malcolm X.” That Was Like The Only Black Book We Read In High School...

You Never Forget The Discovery Years. First Kisses. The First Time You Try Certain Foods.

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

When She Smiles Niggers Ask Her For Her Hand In Marriage; When I Smile Folks Check Their Wallets.

Shot At Twenty-seven Times - What A Dominican Number.

I Sleep Way Too Much And I Read Tremendously.

You Can't Regret The Life You Didn't Lead.

The Thoughts He Put In Her Head. Someone Should’ve Arrested Him For It.

Tell Her That You Love Her Hair, That You Love Her Skin, Her Lips, Because, In Truth, You Love Them More Than You Love Your Own.

The Prisoner's Wife Echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming Of The Bones In The Urgency In Which It Reminds Us Of The Possibility Of Love Even Amidst The Ruins. This Is A Terrifying, Heart-breaking And, Ultimately, Important Book.

[the Biggest Disappointment Is] That He [barack Obama] Deported Everybody And Their Grandmother.

We All Dream Dreams Of Unity, Of Purity; We All Dream That There's An Authoritative Voice Out There That Will Explain Things, Including Ourselves. If It Wasn't For Our Longing For These Things, I Doubt The Novel Or The Short Story Would Exist In Its Current Form. I'm Not Going To Say Much More On The Topic. Just Remember: In Dictatorships, Only One Person Is Really Allowed To Speak. And When I Write A Book Or A Story, I Too Am The Only One Speaking, No Matter How I Hide Behind My Characters.

It's Exactly At These Moments, When All Hope Has Vanished, That Prayer Has Dominion.

What A Surprise (we All Know How Tolerant The Tolerant Are).

Usually At The End Of Each Story We're Thrown Clear Out Of The Story's World And Then We're Given A New World To Enter. What's Unique About A Linked Collection Is That It Can Deliver Both Sets Of Narrative Pleasures - The Novel's Long Immersion Into Character-world And The Story Anthology's Energetic (and Mortal) Brevity - The Linked Collection Is Unique In Its Ability To Be Both Abrupt And Longitudinal Simultaneously.

You Eventually Erase Her Contact Info From Your Phone But Not The Pictures You Took Of Her In Bed While She Was Naked And Asleep, Never Those.

I'm Like Everybody Else: Weak, Full Of Mistakes, But Basically Good.

Spin Is 'something Is Beautiful Because We Say It's Beautiful.'

I Think That America Is Such An Incredibly Dynamic Place Because Of Immigration. We Fundamentally Have Been A Culture That's Been Put Together From The Explosions Of Other Cultures. But It's Hard For Us To See. We Have Blinded Ourselves To The Reality Of What Our Country Is.

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

If You Want To Make A Human Being Into A Monster, Deny Them, At The Cultural Level Any Reflection Of Themselves

New Jersey For Me Is So Alive With History. It's Old, Dynamic, African-american, Latino.

African American

When I Got Heartbroken At 20, It Just Felt Like Someone Had Spiraled A Football Right Into My Skull. At 40, It Feels Like Someone Had Driven A 757 Right Through Me.

Mine (story) Ain't The Scariest, The Clearest, The Most Painful, Or The Most Beautiful. It Just Happens To Be The One That's Got It's Fingers Around My Throat.

My African Roots Made Me What I Am Today. They're The Reason I Exist At All.

I Think That Most Of My Writer Friends Are Really Compulsive. I Think That's Great. It's Wonderful For Them. It's Just Not My Bag. It's Not The Way I Work. But Again, It's Probably Why My Friend Has Ten Books Out And I Have Two.

I'm Not Writing Fairy Tales Or Object Lessons.

Travel Light. She Extended Her Arms To Embrace Her House, Maybe The Whole World.

A Young Person, Or Someone Who's Writing In A Different Way - In Some Ways You Could Say, Eventually Someone Will Find Them. Eventually Someone Will Hear Them. But It's Good A Lot Of Young People Persevere. Because Sometimes You Have To Send Something Out A Thousand Times Before Anyone Recognizes Your Value.

When I Became My Masked Identity I Was This Incredible Little Nerd, But In The Real World I Had To Be This Tough Kid From The Neighborhood.

As Expected: She, The Daughter Of The Fall, Recipient Of Its Heaviest Radiation, Loved Atomically.

To An Outsider, I Just Seem Like A List Of Accomplishments. To Me, All There Is Is How Often I Fail.

In My View, A Writer Is A Writer Because Even When There Is No Hope, Even When Nothing You Do Shows Any Sign Of Promise, You Keep Writing Anyway.

I Never Wanted To Be Away From The Family. Intuitively, I Knew How Easily Distances Could Harden And Become Permanent.

You Don't Want To Let Go, But Don't Want To Be Hurt, Either. It's Not A Great Place To Be But What Can I Tell You?

People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong. I Guess The Best Way Of Saying It Is That No One Could Have Survived What We Survived - Whether It Was First Extermination And Slavery, Then Abandonment And Erasure, Then The Series Of Gunboat Two-bit Dictatorships, Followed By The Final Apotheosis Of Dictatorships, The Trujillato. You Couldn't Survive It Without The Resistance Of This Kind Of Woman.

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