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.

The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.

As a Dominican man, you're socialized to be a playboy. You spend a lot of time being taught that women are important, but without the really positive framework of why. You figure out quickly it's because of culo (ass). But there is a sense that it's not that simple.

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

The idea that America has cornered the market on anti-immigration is ridiculous. It's a global phenomenon.

As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.