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" Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking. "

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" I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters. "

" In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place. "

" I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families. "

" I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that. "

" Genre might certainly increase some of your narrative freedoms, but it also diminishes others. That's the nature of genre. "

" For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first. "

" It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. "

" I think the average guy thinks they're pro-woman, just because they think they're a nice guy and someone has told them that they're awesome. But the truth is far from it. "

" John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights. "

" When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live. "

" I mean, look, we're living in a country where you can't have a non-denominational response. If you're slightly critical of either party, all of the partisans jump on you like you're a lunatic. "

" I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey. "

" I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood. "

" Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it. "

" I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them. "

" Technically, I split my time between N.Y.C. and Boston. "

" I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow. "

" Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families. "

" When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity. "

" I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category. "

" I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections. "

" My thing is, I'm just way too harsh. It's an enormous impediment, and that's just the truth of it. It doesn't make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn't more valorous. I have a character defect, man. "

" I'm one of those apocalyptics. From the start of my immigrant days, I've been fascinated by end-of-the-world stories, by outbreak narratives, and always wanted to set a world-ender on Hispaniola. "

" I sleep way too much and I read tremendously. "

" 'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated. "

" I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness. "

" We have a whole bunch of young people and a whole bunch of families. Are we going to disrupt these families and tear them apart? Or are we going think, like, listen - these people are here. We've got to deal with this reality. We've got to extend the franchise. "

" I know for a fact that - it's just the way our biases work now in the industry of literature, but certainly a short story collection does not receive the same kind of attention as a novel. "

" For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe. "

" Cities produce love and yet feel none. A strange thing when you think about it, but perhaps fitting. Cities need that love more than most of us care to imagine. Cities, after all, for all their massiveness, all their there-ness, are acutely vulnerable. "