I spent my entire childhood feeling like a freak because I liked to read. It's just like, "Eh, no one else likes to read but me; I must be crazy!"

This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

We all have a blind spot and it's shaped exactly like us.

[Immigrating] didn't burn out my desire to travel, though that can happen. There's nothing like immigration to make you want to just stay put. But what I think of as home is this life between Santo Domingo and the parts of New Jersey and New York City that were my childhood, so in my mind it's like home is all those things combined.

The U.S. that I had imagined was nowhere near as crazy and as incredibly damaging and brutal and indifferent as the U.S. that we're currently living in. I thought I was being transgressive, apocalyptic, an out-there person. And then reality lapped me, it just lapped me.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.