Books Don't Live And Die By Awards.

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

The Thing Is - Do We Really Need Another Writer Who Writes A Book Every Eighteen Months, Whether The Quality Is Wonderful Or Not? I Mean, Maybe. But I Can Name Twenty Off The Top Of My Head Who Do It. Maybe What We Need Is A Writer Like Me Who Goes Very Slow, As Well.

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.

I Think There's Something Really Painful About Your Identity Being Entirely Composed Of Ghosts. For Me, I Didn't Want To Be This Kid Whose Dominicanness Was Something Caught Utterly In The Past, Is An Abstraction, The Thing That I Write About. Instead I Wanted It To Be, First And Foremost, A Thing That I Lived.

If You Want To Make A Human Being Into A Monster, Deny Them, At The Cultural Level Any Reflection Of Themselves