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.
Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.
I can’t imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn’t pass through a time of geekiness.
I think a lot of the most interesting immigrant writing involves stepping outside of that old, dreary binary. Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker is a great example. Same goes for Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.
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.
Privilege does not operate without silence.
I discovered early that as an artist there was absolutely nothing wrong with being surrounded by people who were not dedicated to your field.
Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.
We all have a blind spot and it’s shaped exactly like us.
Nobody warned me that when you fall in love, you really fall in love forever.
As for my slowness as a writer – that’s been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.
God bless perseverance. Because it’s not easy.
My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I exist at all.
For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
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.
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.
The Prisoner’s Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat’s Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
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.
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.