Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.

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.

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

We can speculate. Last time I checked, the future doesn't take my advice.

Books are surviving in this intense, fragmented, hyper-accelerated present, and my sense and hope is that things will slow down again and people will want more time for a contemplative life. There is no way people can keep up this pace. No one is happy. Two or three hours to read should not be an unattainable thing, although I hope we get to that stage without needing a corporate sponsored app to hold our hand. The utopian in me has my fingers crossed that we haven't quite figured out the digital future just yet. After all, the one thing we know about people: they always surprise.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves