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

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

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

[Donald] Trump is explained with the intersection of a number of things: our economic crisis, the way it's easier to blame immigrants, with the happenstance that he discovered that by bashing Latino immigrants and characterizing them as "rapists" and "murderers" and "scumbags," suddenly he's got this groundswell of support from a group of people who were raised on this vocabulary.

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.

I think that if you're writing about the human condition, my God, you've got to start at base: point zero, point one, is the body.