It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

I love the kookiness of our speech. Speech is like wonderful magic and poetry in itself. I've always had to crib a lot from what I've heard.

When I was thinking about these women characters, no matter how bad a person I am - a bad writer, my limitations, my sexism, you know - the thought was, it would be useful as a writer to try to create a template for all the male writers, especially Dominican male writers, especially males of color, of how a writer can use seeing to create more nuanced representations of women.

You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.

If you're a status quo writer, you're considered to not be political but that's as political as if you're a progressive writer. Some politics are asked to show their passports and others aren't. In the Dominican Republique, if you're slightly progressive, people have a lot of suspicions that you're up to some sort of conspiracy, that this is some sort of plot. On the other hand, if you're conservative and mainstream, people tend to take that as a given and don't notice the politics.

Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.