Quotes by Francisco Goldman - Page 1 | QuoteForever

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Interviewing is in some ways the art of memory.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Art
Memories
Copy Quote
My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Processing
Me Way Anything
Copy Quote
You witness a lot as a journalist, and what you witness becomes a part of you.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Witness
Copy Quote
I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Proust
Jewish
Myself I Am Way
Identify
Copy Quote
When I see a blatant injustice, I can't keep quiet. I've been that way since I was a little kid.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Injustice
Little Kid
Quiet
Blatant
Copy Quote
Donald Trump is seriously dark and disturbing. You can't just dismiss it as one more example of American pop culture grotesque.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Culture
Dark
Pop Culture
Copy Quote
I had one of those farcical bar mitzvahs where they spell out the words phonetically on index cards, and you don't even know what you're saying.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Cards
Bar
Spell
Copy Quote
In U.S. discourse, immigrants are mostly represented as less than human, a policy problem, or as just that, a category, and categories are prisons.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Categories
Discourse
Immigrants
Prisons
Copy Quote
What's important about me is that I really have, in ways I never could have foreseen when I was young, a writing career that's reached a lot of different places.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Foreseen
Me Important Never
Different Places
Me Important Young
Reached
Copy Quote
I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Possibility
Trying
Writing
Copy Quote
'Say Her Name' was a book I never wanted to write and never expected to write. I wasn't trying to do anything except write a book for Aura - a book that I thought I had to write.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Aura
Copy Quote
I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Memoir
Narrative
Anyway
Claim
Purely
Realm
Copy Quote
The U.S., like any other country, allows tourists into its borders in order to make money off them, and there's nothing wrong with that. Why give out tourist visas if you're not going to let tourists be tourists?
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Borders
Any Other Country
Tourist
Copy Quote
I'm not a Mexican writer, but I think everything that happens in Mexico affects the Mexican writers I know, in their sense of being human and of being Mexican, even if they don't in any explicit way address these issues in their writing.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Mexican
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
Maybe Pope Francis will say something on his visit to the US, maybe he'll rebuke Donald Trump and anti-immigrant racism and demagoguery beautifully, in a way that illuminates hearts and makes people begin to turn away. That would be miracle enough for me.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Heart
People
Racism
Copy Quote
People in the big rich countries are often extremely dismissive of the small countries. They think nothing that happens there is of any interest or that it matters at all, but, at the very least, with that attitude they miss out on some extraordinary stories.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Attitude
Country
Thinking
Copy Quote
The Democrats are hardly agents of change, or even remotely interesting talkers or reality observers. The workings of actual power in the US is so remote from the ordinary person, who, it seems, can only be victimized by it, but is powerless to change anything.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Democrat
Interesting
Reality
Copy Quote
I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Believe
Kind
Thinking
Copy Quote
I think the fact that my wife died in Mexico City makes it very important to me; my life went up in smoke at that moment, the family and the future we were going to have. At that point, I was anchored to the city in a way I've never been anchored to a place before.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Mexico
Mexico City
Smoke
Life Future Family
Anchored
Life Family Future
Copy Quote
The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suffering and trauma that so many in Mexico and Central America endure, and that is all around us whether we notice it or not.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Police
Suffering
Writing
Copy Quote
What I see of the US Presidential elections from down here makes me want to disengage from that particular reality and just hole up and read. It's true. I think if I were living in the US, I would just turn my television and radio off for a year right now, and just read.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Presidential
Reality
Thinking
Copy Quote
My earliest memories of going to Fenway with my father are a blur: many games, me too young to care, but aware that our team 'stunk.' In those years, the 1960s, the Red Sox baseball card I always coveted most was not Carl Yastrzemski's but the far more ordinary Felix Mantilla's.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Blur
Memories
Ordinary
Memories Always Me
Card
Earliest
Earliest Memories
Red Sox
Sox
Copy Quote
I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Creative
Thinking
Writing
Copy Quote
There's a certain advantage to living in a small country like Guatemala, I think. You don't feel so distant from political reality there. When things happen, they almost seem to happen on a Shakespearian stage with the audience so close they can become actors too. This is partly what Joseph Brodsky meant when he wrote that small countries have big politics.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Country
Reality
Thinking
Copy Quote
I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after it was published it's still having an impact in Guatemala. I remember when I wrote it, a surprising number of people said things to me like, "That is such an amazing story; why didn't you turn it into a novel?"
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Art
Book
People
Copy Quote
I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Ambition
Responsibility
Writing
Copy Quote
Mexico just needs more journalists, and especially more good places to publish and exhibit. There are all kinds of censorship practiced in Mexico, not just violent repression. Perhaps the biggest threat to good journalism here is the massive power of the country's media monoliths - Televisa and TV Azteca - who have 80% of the market. They endlessly saturate the country with propaganda and inanity.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Censorship
Country
Journalism
Copy Quote
I'm specifically referring to this certain feeling of sadness, fear, and helplessness that descended on me at the Mexico City protest a day or two after the Narvarte murders. Many of us have grown familiar with that feeling. Every few weeks or so it seems we're hit with some new crime or some new corruption scandal that isn't quite the same as a massacre, but that spawns a feeling of futility and despair in its own way.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Despair
Feelings
Sadness
Copy Quote
There is a culture of corruption in many parts of the Mexican media, of course. It seems that there are fewer and fewer media outlets that permit authentic free expressions. But Mexico also has extraordinary journalists who, despite the dangers they face, have also been leading the way in this battle, who've really played a role in keeping the cause of justice alive in the Ayotzinapa case. And no matter what, they'll keep doing that.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Battle
Justice
Mexican
Copy Quote
Great fiction has been written out of the very darkest circumstances of our narco violence, and nothing written in either fiction or nonfiction has penetrated that darkness so memorably - you can even say beautifully, a relentless riveting forensic dark beauty that some readers in fact find themselves unable to endure - as Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Especially in "The Part about the Crimes." But here's the thing: nobody would call 2666 a "narco novel."
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Crime
Dark
Violence
Copy Quote
Narco fiction novels have a reputation, at least here in Mexico among some of the writers I know, of being somewhat rushed productions, usually written in one way or another like crime thrillers, with something cheesily exploitative about them. It feels exploitive - taking this horrible and ongoing tragedy and trying to turn it into something entertaining. Or trying to turn it into something that might earn the writer a reputation of the sort that many writers believe they aspire to. Or earn them money.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Believe
Tragedy
Trying
Copy Quote
Someone wrote in the New York Times recently that if Donald Trump was allowed to go through with his plans, he'd become one of history's major human rights violators and ethnic cleansers, just below the Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin league. But people don't care. Trump goes on Jimmy Fallon's show and that spineless puff of a talk show host praises Trump for being such an "off the cuff" talker and providing "fresh air." Fresh air! What's fresh about racism? it comes out of the darkest dankest rottenest human cellar!
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
League
People
Racism
Copy Quote
The Peña Nieto government is not going to investigate itself; there's no true autonomy in the investigative and justice branches of the government in Mexico. The recent Mexican crimes and scandals, is profoundly structural, and you'd have to change the way Mexico is run, create a truly independent special prosecutor's office, to even have a chance to get close to achieving justice. People, including the families and many others throughout Mexican society, aren't going to give up in fighting for just that kind of change.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Running
Giving Up
Independent
Copy Quote
I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible to what I've experienced, to what I've lived and been in a position to witness. I realize now that as a consequence of having lived the life I have, quite apart from the one, as I understand it, lived by most American writers, maybe I now know some things and have some stories to tell that others don't know about or wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe there's an intrinsic value in that lived experience and knowledge, though of course what you do with it is everything.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Realizing
Responsibility
Responsible
Copy Quote
If I were the Mexican-American father of a young child who was having trouble sleeping because of Donald Trump, or who was being bullied in school because of Trump, or who was becoming ashamed of her own background because of Trump, and Trump somehow slipped away from his security and was walking down a corridor alone to use the men's room at the restaurant where I worked - if I had that chance to confront him, what would I do? Of course if a Mexican or Latino harmed Trump, it would only make things worse. Let John McCain do it. He's a soldier.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Children
Father
School
Copy Quote
I'm a little skeptical of so-called narco fiction, I have to say, though some writers I admire may have written some narco fiction. You feel the dread and the atmosphere in Yuri Herrera's extraordinary novels, but you'd never say that what he writes is narco fiction. The same goes for Martin Solares's novels, inspired by the nightmare city of Tampico, where he's from. Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, I know that they're deeply affected by what goes on in Mexico, but their wonderful writing points in another direction, though not necessarily always and only.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Atmosphere
Nightmare
Writing
Copy Quote
Donald Trump is an especially depressing phenomena because he is so debased and debasing and millions and millions of people want him to be president. We're seeing how at least whole swathes of white America are becoming your worst nightmare of eternal Zombie High School. Something like a perfect mix of Groundhog Day and The Moronic Inferno. How can it be that a guy who looks like a bloated cadaver pulled from the Gowanus canal, with some rouge on his cheeks and a sticky Something About Mary wig, is actually applauded by his followers for making fun of how other people look?
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Depressing
Fun
School
Copy Quote

Related Novelist Authors

Zoran Drvenkar
Novelist
Wednesday, Jul 19, 1967
Zia Haider Rahman
Novelist
Zelda Fitzgerald
Novelist
Tuesday, Jul 24, 1900
Wednesday, Mar 10, 1948
Zakes Mda
Novelist
Zadie Smith
Novelist
Saturday, Oct 25, 1975
Zachary Lazar
Novelist
Yxta Maya Murray
Novelist
Yury Olesha
Novelist
Friday, Mar 03, 1899
Tuesday, May 10, 1960
Yasutaka Tsutsui
Novelist
Monday, Sep 24, 1934
Yasmine Galenorn
Novelist
Xiaolu Guo
Novelist
Wu Cheng'en
Novelist
Wright Morris
Novelist
Thursday, Jan 06, 1910
Saturday, Apr 25, 1998
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
Novelist
Tuesday, May 07, 1867
Saturday, Dec 05, 1925
Witold Gombrowicz
Novelist
Thursday, Aug 04, 1904
Thursday, Jul 24, 1969

View All Novelist Quotes

Top Authors

Dolly Parton
Singer-Songwriter
Saturday, Jan 19, 1946
Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778
Edgar Allan Poe
Author
Thursday, Jan 19, 1809
Sunday, Oct 07, 1849
Tyler, The Creator
Rapper
Wednesday, Mar 06, 1991
Yogi Berra
Baseball Manager
Tuesday, May 12, 1925
Tuesday, Sep 22, 2015
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father Of The United States
Sunday, Jan 17, 1706
Saturday, Apr 17, 1790
Mahatma Gandhi
Civil Rights Leader
Saturday, Oct 02, 1869
Friday, Jan 30, 1948
Aldous Huxley
Writer
Thursday, Jul 26, 1894
Friday, Nov 22, 1963
William Blake
Poet
Monday, Nov 28, 1757
Sunday, Aug 12, 1827
Mother Teresa
Saint
Friday, Aug 26, 1910
Friday, Sep 05, 1997
Helen Keller
Author
Sunday, Jun 27, 1880
Saturday, Jun 01, 1968
Robert Frost
Poet
Thursday, Mar 26, 1874
Tuesday, Jan 29, 1963
Carl Jung
Psychiatrist
Monday, Jul 26, 1875
Tuesday, Jun 06, 1961
Peter Drucker
Author
Friday, Nov 19, 1909
Friday, Nov 11, 2005
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Writer
Thursday, Aug 28, 1749
Thursday, Mar 22, 1832

View All Authors

Share This Page