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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.

-Junot Diaz

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For Kind Of Sophisticated

Junot Diaz

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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.

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'oscar Wao' For Example Cohered In A Period Of Terrible Distress. All The Novels That I Wanted To Write Were Not Happening.

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.

When You're The Ones In The Life Raft And You Have Four Or Five Women In The Life Raft Who Put It Together, By The End Of It Your Nerves Are Blown. The People You're Going To Attack Are The People Who Are Helping You, Who You Are Holding It Together With.

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

Books Are Surviving In This Intense, Fragmented, Hyper-accelerated Present, And My Sense And Hope Is That Things Will Slow Down Again And People Will Want More Time For A Contemplative Life. There Is No Way People Can Keep Up This Pace. No One Is Happy. Two Or Three Hours To Read Should Not Be An Unattainable Thing, Although I Hope We Get To That Stage Without Needing A Corporate Sponsored App To Hold Our Hand. The Utopian In Me Has My Fingers Crossed That We Haven't Quite Figured Out The Digital Future Just Yet. After All, The One Thing We Know About People: They Always Surprise.

Contemplative Life

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Love Was A Rare Thing, Easily Confused With A Million Other Things, And If Anybody Knew This To Be True It Was Him.

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.

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

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.

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.

There's Little Question That Short Stories, Like Poetry, Don't Get The Respect They Deserve In The Culture - But What Can You Do? Like Canute, One Cannot Fight The Sea, You Have To Go With Your Love, And Hope One Day, Things Change.

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

To Produce That Identity Among Young People Required Guinea Pigs.

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 Sat Down Next To Her. Took Her Hand. This Can Work, I Said. All We Have To Do Is Try.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

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

The Greatest Myth Of All Is What America Is. I Think That America Is Such An Incredibly Dynamic Place Because Of Immigration.

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.

Art Has A Way Of Confronting Us, Of Reminding Us, Of Engaging Us, In What It Means To Be Human, And What It Means To Be Human Is To Be Flawed, Is To Be Contradictory, Is To Be Often Weak, And Yet Despite All Of These What We Would Consider Drawbacks, That We're Also Quite Beautiful. Spin Is The Opposite.

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

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

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.

This Country Has Such Little Sense Of Itself Sometimes, I'm Astonished. America Is One Of The Biggest Myth-making Countries, Whether We're Talking About How Many Books Are Published, How Many Movies We Make. But The Greatest Myth Of All Is What America Is.

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.

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 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.

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Run A Hand Through Your Hair, Like The White Boys Do, Even Though The Only Thing That Runs Easily Through Your Hair Is Africa.

You Know, I Was A Kid Who Had Difficulty Speaking English When I First Immigrated. But In My Head, When I Read A Book, I Spoke English Perfectly. No One Could Correct My Spanish. And I Think That I Retreated To Books As A Way, You Know, To Be, Like, Masterful In A Language That Was Really Difficult For Me For Many Years.

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 Think That Most Of Us Are Aware That As Writers We Are Seeking Absences, We're Seeking Silences, We're Seeking Spaces That People Haven't Entered. No Writer Is Saying, "hey, I Want To Go To This Very Well Trod Territory And Say Exactly What Someone Else Has Done." I Think The Nature Of A Writer, Because We Are Attempting To Bring To Light Areas That People Haven't Seen Before, Tends In Some Ways To Be Progressive, At Least In That Light.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

I Was Surrounded By A Lot Of Male Writers Of Color Who Have This Incredibly Bizarre Relationship To Masculinity. It's Like We Were All Mega-nerds But You Would Never Know That If You Listened To The Way They Talk About Themselves.

Love Is Understood, In A Historical Way, As One Of The Great Human Vocations - But Its Counterspell Has Always Been Infidelity. This Terrible, Terrible Betrayal That Can Tear Apart Not Only Another Person, Not Only Oneself, But Whole Families.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Guess I'm Just Hopelessly Fascinated By The Realities That You Can Assemble Out Of Connected Fragments.

We Get So Many People Saying Short Fiction Is Not Economical, That It Doesn't Sell; But There Are So Many Of Us Enjoying Writing It And Reading It. So It's Wonderful To Be Around People Who Love Short Fiction Too - It's Like Hanging Around With My Tribe.

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.

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.

'a Princess Of Mars' May Not Have Exerted The Same Colossal Pull That Tarzan Had On The Global Imagination, But Its Influence On Generations Of Readers Cannot Be Underestimated.

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.

Beli At Thirteen Believed In Love Like A Seventy-year-old Widow Who's Been Abandoned By Family, Husband, Children And Fortune Believes In God.

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

Here At Last Is Her Smile: Burn It Into Your Memory; You Won't See It Often.

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.

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.

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

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

I Can't Imagine Anybody Who Ends Up Being An Artist Who Didn't Pass Through A Time Of Geekiness.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It Took Me Sixteen Years To Write.

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

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.

An Ear Will Never Do You Wrong, But I Know Writers Who... Most Of The Language They Use Is Just Extracted Language From Other Languages They've Read. I Am A Big-time Reader, But I Mix And Match.

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.

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.

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.

I Seem To Have To Make My Characters Family Before I Can Access Their Hearts In Any Way That Matters.

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

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.

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.

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.

A First Lesson In The Fragility Of Love And The Preternatural Cowardice Of Men. And Out Of This Disillusionment And Turmoil Sprang Beli's First Adult Oath, One That Would Follow Her Into Adulthood, To The States And Beyond. I Will Not Serve.

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.

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.

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

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.

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.

Colleagues Are A Wonderful Thing - But Mentors, That's Where The Real Work Gets Done.

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.

I Find Reading To Be A Delight, A Source Of Comfort, A Way To Explore.

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

Every Single Immigrant We Have, Undocumented Or Documented, Is A Future American. That's Just The Truth Of It.

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

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

In My Mind What Novels Do Best Is That They Immerse Us Deeply Into Our Character's World - They Truly Transport Us Deep Into These Spaces - But The Same Way You Know A Hollywood Movie Won't End After Thirty Minutes, You Carry In Yourself The Implicit Contract That The Novel Won't Throw You Out Of Itself 'til The Very End. That Bulk Of Pages Is A Form Of Consolation, Of Security.

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

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

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.

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

My Thing Is, I'm Just Way Too Harsh. It's An Enormous Impediment, And That's Just The Truth Of It. It Doesn't Make Me Any Better, Make Me Any Worse, It Certainly Isn't More Valorous. I Have A Character Defect, Man.

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.

For Me I Was Always A Smart Nerdy Kid. I Wasn't The Smartest And I Wasn't The Nerdiest, But I Was A Smart Nerdy Kid My Whole Childhood, And I Definitely Wanted To Be Somehow Involved With Reading The Rest Of My Life, And I Came From A Community, I Lived In A Community, I Was Part Of A Community Where Reading Was Considered Completely Alien.

I Think What Happened To Me Was That I Was Always Being Taught To Look, But One Day I Started To See. And It Was Because A Lot Of Women In My Life Were Refusing Just To Be Looked At, To Be This Passive Figure.

I Just Want Some Space To Myself Every Now And Then. Every Time I’m With You I Have This Sense That You Want Something From Me.

I Spent My Entire Childhood Feeling Like A Freak Because I Liked To Read. It's Just Like, "eh, No One Else Likes To Read But Me; I Must Be Crazy!"

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.

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

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

Falling In Love

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

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

I'm Having So Much Trouble With Writing. Maybe If I Help Other People, It'll Be Easier For Me.

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

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.

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.

We Have A Whole Bunch Of Young People And A Whole Bunch Of Families. Are We Going To Disrupt These Families And Tear Them Apart? Or Are We Going Think, Like, Listen - These People Are Here. We’ve Got To Deal With This Reality. We’ve Got To Extend The Franchise.

I Look Most Like Myself... When I'm Wearing My Black, Nerdy Engineering Glasses.

People Can Say What They Want, But Historically, Feminism In The Dominican Republic Has Been Extremely Strong.

I Always Wanted To Read. I Always Thought I Was Going To Be A Historian. I Would Go To School And Study History And Then End Up In Law School, Once, I Ran Out Of Loot Trying To Be A History High School Teacher. But My Dream Was Always To Place Myself In A Situation Where I Was Always Surrounded By Books.

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

[immigrating] Didn't Burn Out My Desire To Travel, Though That Can Happen. There's Nothing Like Immigration To Make You Want To Just Stay Put. But What I Think Of As Home Is This Life Between Santo Domingo And The Parts Of New Jersey And New York City That Were My Childhood, So In My Mind It's Like Home Is All Those Things Combined.

You Were At The Age Where You Could Fall In Love With A Girl Over An Expression, Over A Gesture. That's What Happened With Your Girlfriend, Paloma- She Stooped To Pick Up Her Purse And Your Heart Flew Out Of You.

Falling In Love

We Can Speculate. Last Time I Checked, The Future Doesn't Take My Advice.

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.

Love Is The Only Thing - I Don't Want To Say That "makes It Bearable" - But I Feel Like Without The Possibility Of Love, This Place Would Just Devour Us.

I Think That Distance Is Good For Some People For Certain Projects. I Mean This Is Sort Of A Dynamic Question. Some Projects Require More Distance Than Others, Some Don't Require It At All. Sometimes You Need It And Sometimes You Don't.

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.

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.

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.

On The Outside, Oscar Simply Looked Tired, No Taller, No Fatter, Only The Skin Under His Eyes, Pouched From Years Of Quiet Desperation, Had Changed. Inside, He Was In A World Of Hurt. He Saw Black Flashes Before His Eyes. He Saw Himself Falling Through The Air. He Knew What He Was Turning Into. He Was Turning Into The Worst Kind Of Human On The Planet: An Old Bitter Dork. Saw Himself At The Game Room, Picking Through The Miniatures For The Rest Of His Life. He Didn't Want This Future But He Couldn't See How It Could Be Avoided, Couldn't Figure His Way Out Of It. Fukú.

My Mother Took Care Of Us Until My Father Scrammed, And Then She Ended Up Working In The Small-factory Sector Of New Jersey With A Lot Of Other Immigrants.

God Bless Perseverance. Because It's Not Easy.

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.

I Think There's Something Really Painful About Your Identity Being Entirely Composed Of Ghosts. For Me, I Didn't Want To Be This Kid Whose Dominicanness Was Something Caught Utterly In The Past, Is An Abstraction, The Thing That I Write About. Instead I Wanted It To Be, First And Foremost, A Thing That I Lived.

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

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.

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

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.

The Anti-immigrant Logic Has Basically Saturated Our World. I'm Staying, And I'm Fighting.

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

I Mean In The Community That I Grew Up In, You Know, A Very, You Know, Mixed, Almost Entirely African Diaspora Community, One Of The Things That We Were Not Ever Supposed To Say Was How Much Self-hatred And Colorism Determined And Guided What We Would Call Our Desire. In Other Words, What We Would Consider Beautiful.

'drown' Was Always A Hybrid Book. It's Connected Stories - Partially A Story Collection But Partially A Novel. I Always Wanted The Reader To Decide Which Genre They Thought The Book Belonged To More - Story, Novel, Neither, Both.

Nobody Warned Me That When You Fall In Love, You Really Fall In Love Forever.

Falling In Love

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.

Honestly, Connecting Once At The Deepest Level With Someone, You Know, Once You've Done That, Even If Your Life Goes To Hell, Man, It Was Really Worth Living.

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

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.

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.

Nothing More Exhilarating ... Than Saving Yourself By The Simple Act Of Waking.

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

I Mean, I’m An Artist By Nature, No One Considers What I Do And No One Knows Who The Heck I Am, But That Anybody Does - It Is Astonishing.

I Came Up Under [ronald] Reagan And Under [george] Bush, And What Are We To Do Now? We Are Here To Fight. People Can Run Off All They Want. But For Me, [donald] Trump Is Already In The Dominican Republic.

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.

There's Nothing More True In Being A Child Of A Diaspora, A Child Of Immigrants. We're Completely New To Our Parents. We're Not Something They Can Ever Understand. And It's Not As If We Are Ever Going To Be Accepted. 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.

Once Someone Gets A Little Escape Velocity Going, Ain't No Play In The World That Will Keep Them From Leaving.

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

African American

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.)

Our Relationship Wasn't The Sun, The Moon, The Stars, But It Wasn't Bullshit, Either.

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

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

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

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

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

The Only Way Out Is In.

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

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.

New Jersey Is To New York What Santo Domingo Is To The United States. I Always Felt That Those Two Landscapes, Not Only Just The Landscapes Themselves But Their Relationships To What We Would Call 'a Center' Or 'the Center Of The Universe,' Has In Some Ways Defined My Artistic And Critical Vision.

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

Instead Of Finding Himself In Nerd Heaven—where Every Nerd Gets Fifty-eight Virgins To Role-play With—he Woke Up In Robert Wood Johnson With Two Broken Legs And A Separated Shoulder, Feeling Like, Well, He'd Jumped Off The New Brunswick Train Bridge.

[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.

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

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.

I Really Am A Believer That 99.99% Of All The Stories We Need, Not Only As Artists But As Human Beings, Not Only As Writers But As Readers, Haven't Been Written Yet. Certainly Haven't Been Published Yet.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

I Was Part Of That Group Of Kids Growing Up In The '80s Under The Reagan Regime, What I Used To Call 'living In The Shadow Of Dr. Manhattan,' Where We Would Have Dreams All The Time That New York City Was Being Destroyed, And That That Wall Of Light And Destruction Was Rolling Out And Would Just Devour Our Neighborhood.

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.

You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

[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.

If You, Like, Consciously Think About Being Cool, You're Not Cool. If You Consciously Think About Being, Like, Different Or Original, You Ain't Different Or Original.

I Sleep Way Too Much And I Read Tremendously.

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