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" Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous. "

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" We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe. "

" 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. "

" Let me tell you, if I could write one-tenth as fast as some of my friends, I'd be made. I'd be it. But instead I happen to be, in the tree of life of writers, down at the bottom, with the hematodes. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns. "

" I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books. "

" 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. "

" In the end, all worlds, whether they're set in the future or in New Jersey of today, are fictions. Sure, you don't got to do too much work to build a mundane world, but don't get it twisted: you still got to do some work. "

" 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. "

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

" I mean, I'm an artist by nature; no one considers what I do and no one knows who the heck I am, but that anybody does - it is astonishing. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men. "

" 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. "

" When I think about my own relationships to the women that I really loved, it feels like that love, even after we've broken up and we're no longer speaking, that love never goes away. No one told me that. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "