I don’t know why I didn’t come across this interview with my Dominican boyfriend, Pulitzer Prize winning Junot Diaz, before, pero it made me love him more. Hopefully we won’t have to wait 11 years for his next book.

Before I immigrated, I had no interest in books, no interest in newspapers, no interest in anything like that. There were plenty of little comics in the Dominican Republic, little pictorial books, penny dreadfuls: I had no interest in those whatsoever. But when I immigrated to the United States there was the crisis of being an immigrant who couldn’t speak the language very well, who didn’t understand the culture very well. I needed a way to express myself and a way to be engaged in the English language without it being a form of punishment. Speaking, during those early years, was a punishment. There was a lot of ridicule and a lot of cruelty, and instead of practicing aloud I could more safely read and practice language in my head.