Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.
I'm of African descent and my sister looks completely black, but I didn't look black. I was the super-nerdy kid who was also willing to fight.
If we do not begin to practice the muscles of having a possessive investment in each other's oppressions, then we are in some serious trouble.
Katrina was one of those things that rips the clothes off of the guy who keeps saying he's a saint, and underneath you see that he's a monster.
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.
Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.
In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves.
I spent my entire childhood feeling like a freak because I liked to read. It's just like, "Eh, no one else likes to read but me; I must be crazy!"
When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling.
Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
The thing is, you try your best, and what else you got? You try your best, really, that's all you can do. And for me, my best happens really so rarely.
Love is the only thing - I don't want to say that "makes it bearable" - but I feel like without the possibility of love, this place would just devour us.
In minority communities there's a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There's a misunderstanding of what an artist does.
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.
I've been trying to write. I also spent a lot of time on different campuses, in conversation, helping other writers. That's what I do: I teach them writing.
Honestly, connecting once at the deepest level with someone, you know, once you've done that, even if your life goes to hell, man, it was really worth living.
For me it's a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.
Mine (story) ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I got heartbroken at 20, it just felt like someone had spiraled a football right into my skull. At 40, it feels like someone had driven a 757 right through me.
If you, like, consciously think about being cool, you're not cool. If you consciously think about being, like, different or original, you ain't different or original.
I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.
I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.
You're Dominican only if you do this, this, and that. And if you do this and that, you'll be accepted to a certain degree and if you don't, people will scorn you for it.
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
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.
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.
Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.
[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.
'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 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.
My greatest responsibility is to acknowledge the mistakes and the shortcomings of the country in which I live, to acknowledge my privileges, and to try to make it a better place.
I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down. As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it.
Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.
[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.
In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
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.
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
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.
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.
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.
For me, the battle isn't Hillary [Clinton] vs. [Bernie] Sanders. And I understand that for some people that's the battle. But for me, more than anything, it's stopping a Republican president.
Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
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.
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.