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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.

-Junot Diaz

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We Know Story Collections

Junot Diaz

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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.

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

Falling In Love

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.

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

[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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I 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

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.

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

To Produce That Identity Among Young People Required Guinea Pigs.

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

Anger Has A Way Of Returning.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Falling In Love

'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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

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

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

I'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

I'm Just This Dominican Kid From New Jersey.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

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.

...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.

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

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

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

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

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

'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 Only Way Out Is In.

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 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.

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.

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 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."

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I Sleep Way Too Much And I Read Tremendously.

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

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