When you're the ones in the life raft and you have four or five women in the life raft who put it together, by the end of it your nerves are blown. The people you're going to attack are the people who are helping you, who you are holding it together with.

You're Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you'll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don't, people will scorn you for it.

The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.

You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

I think that distance is good for some people for certain projects. I mean this is sort of a dynamic question. Some projects require more distance than others, some don't require it at all. Sometimes you need it and sometimes you don't.

Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.

Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.