Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

We still have our people working in the cane fields in the Dominican Republic. People are still repatriated all the time from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of being taken off buses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic still can't go to school and are forced to work in the sugarcane fields.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.

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.

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.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.