Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

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.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.

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.

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

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 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.