When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

The whole history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is complicated. We share the island of Hispaniola, and Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic for twenty-two years after 1804 for fear that the French and Spanish would come back and reinstitute slavery. So we have this unique situation of being two independent nations on the same island, but with each community having its own grievance.

The best moment in writing any book is when you just can't wait to get back to the writing, when you can't wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.

It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head. -pg. 25