I was so sheltered as a kid that when I went to college, it was like taking the chains off. That's where the trouble came from. It was the first time for me being by myself, and I got into everything you could think of.

When you get to the big games you never know when you are going to be back so you've got to try as best as you can to take advantage of those opportunities.

In this game you only get a few opportunities.

Each season and each team is different. It takes on a different personality every year.

I had games where I had better statistics than others, but it wasn't because I wasn't playing hard.

Different teams put me in different situations.

I want to get as good as I can possibly be.

I tell you this: I'm not an outdoorsman. Actually, one of my things is to pick a little corner in Borders or Barnes & Noble and fall back and just read.

I want to have an impact on the game. Instead of a sack, how about an interception for a touchdown? I could get 15 tackles. I'm just using those as examples, but any kind of impact would be fine, whether it's a sack or anything else.

People who are given a lot, a lot is expected out of them. I realize that, but I also realize expectations are unrealistic sometimes.

It's something I take a lot of pride in, that people compliment me and hold me in high regard.

In Charlotte, it was all about the Panthers.

As long as my body will allow me to play I'm going to continue to play.

Hopefully I can be one of the better players to play in this league. That's what I'm working for.

I can honestly say I want to be one of the best to ever play the game.

That's what this game is about; it's about relationships.

You don't want to be one of these guys talking all the time, trying to say things all the time, because people start drowning you out.

I've always been a guy who's reserved my words for the right time.

Early in my career, I played with a guy in Mike Rucker who was a threat on the other side.

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

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.

I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations - but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.

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.

People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end - whether we've had direct experience or not - there's part of you that knows there's absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.

I seem to enjoy telling stories with a central absence, with a lacuna tunnelled into them.

My African roots made me what I am today. They're the reason I exist at all.

I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet.

I was part of that group of kids growing up in the '80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call 'living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,' where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.

I'm a product of a fragmented world.

I guess I'm just hopelessly fascinated by the realities that you can assemble out of connected fragments.

Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they're asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.

John Carter was also one of our first recognizable superhumans and there is little doubt that his extraordinary physical feats inspired Superman's creators. Remember: before Superman could fly or turn back time, he was nothing less than an earthbound crime-fighting John Carter in tights.

Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we're also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.

Artists are not cheerleaders, and we're not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we're in.

I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.

I mean in the community that I grew up in, you know, a very, you know, mixed, almost entirely African Diaspora community, one of the things that we were not ever supposed to say was how much self-hatred and colorism determined and guided what we would call our desire. In other words, what we would consider beautiful.

Infidelity raises profound questions about intimacy.

God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.

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

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

I read a book a week, man. And I don't have a great memory, but I have a good memory about what I read.

I look most like myself... when I'm wearing my black, nerdy engineering glasses.

We get so many people saying short fiction is not economical, that it doesn't sell; but there are so many of us enjoying writing it and reading it. So it's wonderful to be around people who love short fiction too - it's like hanging around with my tribe.

Students teach all sorts of things but most importantly they make explicit the courage that it takes to be a learner, the courage it takes to open yourself to the transformative power of real learning and that courage I am exposed to almost every day at MIT and that I'm deeply grateful for.

I have a very powerful sense of place, but I have a very powerful sense of being a migrant, so it's both. It seems like I'm always leaving my home. That's part of the formula. I love the Dominican Republic. I go back all the time. I love New Jersey. Go back all the time.

A young person, or someone who's writing in a different way - in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it's good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.

When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.