We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.

Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.

The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.

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.

AIDS was something that was put upon us [as haitians], and we were immediately identified with it. That is unfair. That is unjust. I always say, "We are all people living with AIDS." It's not like you can avoid it. It's part of our world.

Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.