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.
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 have three storage units, and that’s no lie. Three storage units. All books.
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.
‘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.
Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I’m deeply grateful for.
It’s extraordinary how many people read a book that’s new and weird and befriend it.
I act most like myself… when I’m in my hometown, Santo Domingo. I try to get there about five times a year.
John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman’s creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.
Any art worth its name requires you to be fundamentally lost for a very long time.
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.
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.
People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end – whether we’ve had direct experience or not – there’s part of you that knows there’s absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.
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.
Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that’s not how it worked out.
I’m an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.
I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship – it’s all one person speaking.
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.
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.
It took me sixteen years to write.
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There’s another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier… Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it’s both. It seems like I’m always leaving my home. That’s part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.
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 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 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.
I feel most like myself… after I run – I go out for five miles every morning.
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