Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.
Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.
She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.
Clavo saca clavo. Nothing sacas nothing, you reply. No one will ever be like her.
The people I know who would support [Donald] Trump are keeping their mouths shut.
Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
The truth is there ain’t no relationship in the world that doesn’t hit turbulence.
It's extraordinary how many people read a book that's new and weird and befriend it.
It's exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
As artists we are here to make you uncomfortable with the complexity of your reality.
That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.
Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.
The art is just really mysterious. If I understood it more, maybe I would write more.
Nobody likes children, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.
New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.
You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.
I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'
The anti-immigrant logic has basically saturated our world. I'm staying, and I'm fighting.
Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertibe knowledge that she will never forgive you.
Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.
I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me.
I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture
but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
The only difference between a published and unpublished writer is a tolerance for imperfection.
[The biggest disappointment is] that he [Barack Obama] deported everybody and their grandmother.
I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.
It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.
When she smiles niggers ask her for her hand in marriage; when I smile folks check their wallets.
And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.
Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.
As expected: she, the daughter of the Fall, recipient of its heaviest radiation, loved atomically.
I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.
I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading... that was about as geeky as you could possibly get.
To an outsider, I just seem like a list of accomplishments. To me, all there is is how often I fail.
I love “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That was like the only black book we read in high school...
Just the fact that you get to live and breathe and interact with the world - that's pretty marvelous.
I seem to have to make my characters family before I can access their hearts in any way that matters.
I can always tell if someone's from Harvard because they trot out their vitae. I would die at Harvard.
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.
I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.
Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
The world should always be concerned whenever a vast human rights violation occurs anywhere on the planet.