Background Image

...

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

-Junot Diaz

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

- Nothing Else Has

Junot Diaz

...

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

Views: 6

Topic

More From Junot Diaz

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.

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.

My Thing Is Every Generation Of Americans Has To Answer What We Call The 'superman Question.' Superman Comes, Lands In America. He's Illegal. He's One Of These Kids. He's Wrapped Up In A Red Bullfighter's Cape. And You've Got To Decide What We're Gonna Do With Superman.

My Father Was A Trigamist; He Supported Three Families. We Were Never Not Poor.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

In '94, I Started Writing A Novel About An Enormous Terrorist Act That Destroyed The United States. The Novel Takes Place Twenty Years After This Destruction, With All The Stuff That We're Dealing With Now - A Dirty War, The Disappeared, The Concept Of Terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 Happened Some Years Into The Process, And I Was Like, Ok, I Don't Have A Novel.

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

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

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.

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

I Think That If You're Writing About The Human Condition, My God, You've Got To Start At Base: Point Zero, Point One, Is The Body.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The U.s. That I Had Imagined Was Nowhere Near As Crazy And As Incredibly Damaging And Brutal And Indifferent As The U.s. That We're Currently Living In. I Thought I Was Being Transgressive, Apocalyptic, An Out-there Person. And Then Reality Lapped Me, It Just Lapped Me.

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

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

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

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

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.

She Had Reason To Doubt Him; He Was Real Good At Planning But Real Bad At Doing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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

I'm Just This Dominican Kid From New Jersey.

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.

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.

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.

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

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!"

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.

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

I Sleep Way Too Much And I Read Tremendously.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I'm Not Writing Fairy Tales Or Object Lessons.

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.

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.

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

If We Do Not Begin To Practice The Muscles Of Having A Possessive Investment In Each Other's Oppressions, Then We Are In Some Serious Trouble.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 Have Three Storage Units, And That's No Lie. Three Storage Units. All Books.

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.

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

I Can Always Tell If Someone's From Harvard Because They Trot Out Their Vitae. I Would Die At Harvard.

What We [writers] Do Might Be Done In Solitude And With Great Desperation, But It Tends To Produce Exactly The Opposite. It Tends To Produce Community And In Many People Hope And Joy.

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.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

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.

You're The Only Person I've Ever Met Who Can Stand A Bookstore As Long As I Can.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Technically, I Split My Time Between N.y.c. And Boston.

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

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.

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.

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.

You Try Every Trick In The Book To Keep Her. You Write Her Letters. You Quote Neruda. You Cancel Your Facebook. You Give Her The Passwords To All Your E-mail Accounts. Because You Know In Your Lying Cheater’s Heart That Sometimes A Start Is All We Ever Get.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Anger Has A Way Of Returning.

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

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

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.

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

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

Falling In Love

It Took Me Sixteen Years To Write.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

You Whispered My Full Name And We Fell Asleep In Each Other's Arms And I Remember How The Next Morning You Were Gone, Completely Gone, And Nothing In My Bed Or The House Could Have Proven Otherwise.

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

The One Thing About Being A Dude And Writing From A Female Perspective Is That The Baseline Is, You Suck. The Baseline Is It Takes So Long For You To Work Those Atrophied Muscles - For You To Get On Parity With What Women's Representations Of Men Are.

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.

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?

[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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Falling In Love

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.

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.

The Half-life Of Love Is Forever.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

...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.

[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.

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.

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

Migration Gives A Blank Cheque To Put Anything You Don't Feel Like Addressing In The Memory Hold. No Neighbours Can Go Against The Monster Narrative Of Your Family.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

African American

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do You Remember? When The Fights Seemed To Go On And On, And Always Ended With Us In Bed, Tearing At Each Other Like Maybe That Could Change Everything. In A Couple Of Months You'd Be Seeing Somebody Else And I Would Too; She Was No Darker Than You But She Washed Her Panties In The Shower And Had Hair Like A Sea Of Little Punos And The First Time You Saw Us, You Turned Around And Boarded A Bus I Knew You Didn't Have To Take. When My Girl Said, Who Was That? I Said, Just Some Girl.

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.

To Produce That Identity Among Young People Required Guinea Pigs.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Out Of Nowhere You Said, I Love You. For Whatever It's Worth.

For Me, The Battle Isn't Hillary [clinton] Vs. [bernie] Sanders. And I Understand That For Some People That's The Battle. But For Me, More Than Anything, It's Stopping A Republican President.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 Didn't Start Writing Until Late High School And Then I Was Just Diddling. Mainly I Loved To Read And My Writing Was An Outgrowth Of That.

I Think The Average Guy Thinks They're Pro-woman, Just Because They Think They're A Nice Guy And Someone Has Told Them That They're Awesome. But The Truth Is Far From It.

Trending Author

Hilda Doolittle

N. Scott Momaday

Category