Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We're all funny. Humor unites us.
I am actually a 'Seven Samurai' fan.
I often say poetry was my first love.
Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one.
Words are the only bread we can really share.
To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time.
Laughter is a virus that infects you with humanity.
If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.
I had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns.
I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about.
Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.
I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.
Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them.
I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.
We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.
Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.
Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me.
I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma.
I've been treated beautifully wherever I've gone, and I really think we all want to love each other.
I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war.
During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles.
The world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.
Borders are liminal spaces. Anyone worthy of the title of 'writer' is a border writer. We all are border people.
When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.
The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.
I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.'
I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached.
Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too.
In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.
I've been told not to tour down in Mexico. I am too well-known now. The kidnappers may think that my publisher will pay a ransom.
The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.
Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.
When 'The Hummingbird's Daughter' came out, there was a certain backlash - 'Well, this isn't 'The Devil's Highway.'' That's just the way it goes.
Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives.
I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.
The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.
A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s.
I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration.
I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write.
It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.
The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.
I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed.
I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku!
A lot of our family was undocumented. My mom and dad were both super conservative. My dad had a green card; my mom was an Eisenhower Republican who did not approve of all the 'illegal people.'
It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.
It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.
I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story.