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 biggest disappointment is] that he [Barack Obama] deported everybody and their grandmother.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.

There's a long-term tradition of white supremacy in this country. [Donald] Trump isn't something entirely new. But then there is the crisis for white supremacy in this country now where you have people of color standing up for themselves in ways that they've never stood up for themselves or at least standing up for themselves in a generational, novel way.

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.