'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

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.

I don't think you can be from the Caribbean and not know a certain amount about the apocalypse.

The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level any reflection of themselves

We get these lives for free. I didn't do anything to get this life, and no matter what the hardships are, it is free and, in a way, it's an extraordinary bargain.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

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.

[Donald] Trump is taking America's dirty laundry to the center stage. Everything he does, the rest of the country already does really well: victimize immigrants, poor people, women.

Old people deserves a medal, a medal of existence which crowns their long-term victory against the cruelty of time and the dangers of this chaotic universe!

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

I've got big shoes to fill. This is my chance to do something. I have to seize the moment.

You just can't imagine the kind of guy he was without seeing him play. He was a circus, a play, a movie, all rolled into one.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. ...Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.

"The New York Times" is reporting correctly that women had accused a presidential candidate of sexual assault. Now that's news on any level. I mean you can't argue that that's not news.

Forgiveness is not a one-time-only event. It is a process.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

If you truly believe in the brotherhood of man, then you must believe that blacks are just as capable of being racists as whites are.