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You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

-Junot Diaz

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You Can't Be A

Junot Diaz

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You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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

A Person Doesn't Mourn Forever.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

You Can't Be A Human Without Seeing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

For 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.

Privilege Does Not Operate Without Silence.

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.

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

African American

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

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

I'm Just This Dominican Kid From New Jersey.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Am A Chatty Person, But Colossally Discreet.

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

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.

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.

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

Infidelity Raises Profound Questions About Intimacy.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

I'm Not Writing Fairy Tales Or Object Lessons.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

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

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

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

Anger Has A Way Of Returning.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Books Are Wonderful, But They Aren't That Powerful.

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.

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.

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.

...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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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.

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 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!"

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Half-life Of Love Is Forever.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

To Produce That Identity Among Young People Required Guinea Pigs.

[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 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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

Falling In Love

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

When I Read Toni Morrison And Sandra Cisneros As A Freshman At Rutgers, It All Clicked - That Writing Was All I Wanted To Do. It Became My Calling.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I Grew Up In The Shadow Of The Trujillato, Saw How The Regime Had Ravaged So Many Families.

It Took Me Sixteen Years To Write.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I Sleep Way Too Much And I Read Tremendously.

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

I 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.

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

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.

Character Is The Plot In Many Ways

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