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.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

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.

The people I know who would support [Donald] Trump are keeping their mouths shut.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.

I think men spend so much time passing for being men. There's a sense among many writers of color that the most invisible figure that was sitting between all of us was the nerd. But it was the thing we weren't saying, that people were afraid to say, like, "Yo, what we do is nerdy by definition."

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.