Quotes by Francisco Goldman - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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Interviewing is in some ways the art of memory.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Art
Memories
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My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Processing
Me Way Anything
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You witness a lot as a journalist, and what you witness becomes a part of you.
Francisco Goldman / Novelist
Witness
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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'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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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