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

-Junot Diaz

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- Nothing Else Has

Junot Diaz

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

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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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Motherfuckers Will Read A Book That’s One Third Elvish, But Put Two Sentences In Spanish And They [white People] Think We’re Taking Over.

To Produce That Identity Among Young People Required Guinea Pigs.

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

[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.

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

Stories Are Hard. I Have Friends Who Knock Out Stories On A Weekly Or Monthly Basis, Like They're Running On Medicinal-strength Updike. But For Me A Story Is As Daunting A Prospect As A Novel.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

'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.

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

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

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.

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

[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.

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

...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'm Just This Dominican Kid From New Jersey.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.'

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

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.

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 Have A Very Powerful Sense Of Place, But I Have A Very Powerful Sense Of Being A Migrant, So It's Both. It Seems Like I'm Always Leaving My Home. That's Part Of The Formula. I Love The Dominican Republic. I Go Back All The Time. I Love New Jersey. Go Back All The Time.

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.

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.

I Sleep Way Too Much And I Read Tremendously.

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

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

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'm Not Writing Fairy Tales Or Object Lessons.

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.

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.

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

She's Sensitive, Too. Takes To Hurt The Way Water Takes To Paper.

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

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

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

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

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

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

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

African American

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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'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.

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

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

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

Falling In Love

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.

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

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.

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.

I Think Men Spend So Much Time Passing For Being Men.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

God Bless Perseverance. Because It's Not Easy.

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

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

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

Falling In Love

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

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.

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

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

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

[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.

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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