I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

[The biggest disappointment is] that he [Barack Obama] deported everybody and their grandmother.

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.

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.

In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.

You can't regret the life you didn't lead.