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.
Spin is ‘something is beautiful because we say it’s beautiful.’
Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we’re always lacking something.
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 really am a believer that 99.99% of all the stories we need, not only as artists but as human beings, not only as writers but as readers, haven’t been written yet. Certainly haven’t been published yet.
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.
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.
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 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 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 seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.
I sleep way too much and I read tremendously.
I love ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’ That was like the only black book we read in high school.
I have three storage units, and that’s no lie. Three storage units. All books.
Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.
The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.
I don’t think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.
Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.