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.

I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'

It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

I think that most of my writer friends are really compulsive. I think that's great. It's wonderful for them. It's just not my bag. It's not the way I work. But again, it's probably why my friend has ten books out and I have two.

To produce that identity among young people required guinea pigs.

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.