Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse. "

Related Quotes:

" Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite. "

" When I enter that higher-order space that's required to write, I'm a better human. For whatever my writing is, wherever it's ranked, it definitely is the one place that I get to be beautiful. "

" My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all. "

" 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. "

" I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived. "

" 'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both. "

" Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever. "

" Migration gives a blank cheque to put anything you don't feel like addressing in the memory hold. No neighbours can go against the monster narrative of your family. "

" 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. "

" Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out. "

" Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in. "

" 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. "

" I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films. "

" 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. "

" We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain. "

" I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons. "

" Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards. "

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

" I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read. "

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

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

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

" I'm an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever. "

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

" I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time. "

" 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'm a product of a fragmented world. "

" My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants. "