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

New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.

My thing is every generation of Americans has to answer what we call the 'Superman Question.' Superman comes, lands in America. He's illegal. He's one of these kids. He's wrapped up in a red bullfighter's cape. And you've got to decide what we're gonna do with Superman.

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

I'm just this Dominican kid from New Jersey.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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'm still trying to figure out how to write about cancer and my family's experience with it. If I had been able to write 'The Pura Principle' back in those days, I'm positive it would have had no humor in it. Which means the story would have been false.

In fact, looking at the darkest sides of the United States has only made me appreciate the things that we do right, the things that we do beautifully. We are, for all of our mistakes and all of our crimes, a remarkable place.

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones.

I feel most like myself... after I run - I go out for five miles every morning.

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

It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

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.

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 can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn't pass through a time of geekiness.

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.

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

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

'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.

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.

My father was a Little League dictator. That really affected me, his control-freakery, his impunity, his arbitrary unreasonable power.

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.

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

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

I act most like myself... when I'm in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.

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.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.

I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.

I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

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.

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

You never forget the discovery years. First kisses. The first time you try certain foods.

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