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" God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy. "

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" My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power. "

" I've always thought that you don't love a country by turning a blind eye to its crimes and to a problem. The way that you love a country is by seeing everything that it's done wrong, all of its mistakes, and still thinking that it's beautiful and that it's worthy. "

" I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss. "

" In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does. "

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

" You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods. "

" Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for. "

" My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place. "

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

" I'm a product of a fragmented world. "

" 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. "

" Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing. "

" You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. "

" 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. "

" The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. "

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

" 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. "

" I do think that books are invaluable as a reservoir of what we call the human space. And this is why I think that, even if they're threatened, the work that they do has an incalculable merit. "

" 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 write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones. "

" To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail. "

" Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done. "

" You know, I was a kid who had difficulty speaking English when I first immigrated. But in my head, when I read a book, I spoke English perfectly. No one could correct my Spanish. And I think that I retreated to books as a way, you know, to be, like, masterful in a language that was really difficult for me for many years. "

" 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. "

" I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work. "

" 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. "

" 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 mean, the nation in which we live - and the world in which we live - is so extraordinarily more like a future than the futures that we're being sold on the screen and on television. "

" Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something. "

" So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know. "