You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture

[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.

I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.

Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.