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" I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments. "

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

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

" We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way. "

" I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful. "

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

" 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. "

" I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard. "

" '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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time. "

" 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 read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it. "

" People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it. "

" 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 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. "

" My father was a trigamist; he supported three families. We were never not poor. "

" 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. "

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

" I am a person who dreads any kind of public exposure and any kind of public event. I spend all day, if I have to do a reading, preparing. "

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

" There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction. "

" I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it. "