You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.

I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.

You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.

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.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.