A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.

The body is what reminds us on a daily basis that we're human. The body defies us, it betrays us, we have to struggle with it, you know. And it reveals in curious and in abiding ways how we are not perfect.

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

When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.

When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level. Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see. Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.