I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn't have a safe category.

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.

True violence, not the kind you usually see in television or movies, touches something very deep and primal in people.

Point of view is not something I consciously decide. Almost always, when I come up with a plot I find that the point of view has automatically arrived with it, part and parcel of the story.

Just sing it. Don't prove you can sing it. I know you can, you know you can. So just do it, because if you try to prove it, you'll lose.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.

I play music because I love it and I'll keep playin' till I'm old.

Love is always the same but people change.

Silence is an argument in favor of the status quo. A refusal to address an inequity is a strategy for maintaining that inequity.

Everything has a cause.

Thou art relieved of thy duties!