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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power. "

" I'm sure I'm one of those undiagnosed people with social anxiety. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 find infidelity interesting because it's so revelatory about people. It's this really silent thing. Everyone acknowledges it as a general practice, but nobody likes to go beyond that, to get down to the nitty-gritty. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper. "

" 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. "

" Spin is 'something is beautiful because we say it's beautiful.' "

" It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it. "

" I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet. "

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

" I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. "

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

" I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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 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. "

" Long before the idea of multiculturalism, in public people could say almost anything to you and get away with it. "

" 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. "