From interviews Quotes
52 quotes
"said I was stealing from the black man, and I was failing at it whereas was succeeding. So fuck 'em."
"Everything I ever projected to be it was—even the stinky, ratty, vomity part of it. Everybody has to do the subway. Everybody has to smell the same smells. And people get mad all the time. When people don’t like something, like ‘Get out of my way you blah, blah, blah.’ But [in L.A.] it’s like, ‘How ya doing? Let’s do lunch! I love you!’"
"Why do they always show up there bleeding and dying on the cross? We don't remember lying there with a bullet hole in his head. I'm against the arbitrary organization of as a concept. We should all experience it all individually and purely. I don't agree with the separation of God and the body, I don't believe that we aren't a part of 'it', I don't agree that it's a man. In most religions there's no place for women. There aren't any women in the and I need that. I love women, I came from a woman."
"and and , all dark, all romantic. When I say "romantic," I mean a sensibility that sees everything, and has to express everything, and still doesn't know what the fuck it is, it hurts that bad. It just madly tries to speak whatever it feels, and that can mean vast things. That sort of mentality can turn a sun-kissed orange into a flaming meteorite, and make it sound like that in a song."
"I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people."
"I began writing the book with the thought that maybe what we needed was the biological conscience. It does seem to me that there are too many people in this world who would just as soon wipe out half their country if they could rule the other half."
"I want to write about what's going to happen if we keep doing what we've been doing, if we keep recklessly endangering the environment, if we keep paying no attention to economic realities, if we keep paying no attention to educational needs, if we keep doing a lot of the things that are hurting us now. And that's what I wound up writing about. And everything else just kind of fell into it, fell into place."
"I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers."
"The hijab has nothing to do with moral values. A woman's moral values are reflected in her eyes, in the way she talks, and in the way she walks. They put on a hijab and go dancing, wearing high heels and lipstick. They wear tight jeans that show their bellies."
"Poetry is a potent tool capable of guiding societies worldwide through its invisible aesthetic strength."
"Imagery plays a vital role in conveying a message, bringing it to life, and engaging readers' senses and emotions."
"Anything that touches my heart holds the potential to inspire me."
"Nature is the grandest warehouse discovered on this planet, hence anything that touches my heart holds the potential to inspire me, as it enables me to delve into my emotions and forge connections with others through shared experiences."
"The importance of forging meaningful relationships and exploring the intricacies of human connections has served as a catalyst for my creative expression."
"Through my writing, I aim to highlight the significance of fostering healthy and fulfilling relationships and inspire others to cherish the bonds they share with fellow human beings."
"Imagery immerses readers in the ambiance created by the pebbles of words, making it compelling and memorable."
"My ultimate aspiration in life is to contribute to a world where peace prevails, as peace is the ultimate achievement to realize in life."
"Writing is also like love, if one can't have the courage to be a renunciant, they cannot write well."
"At this juncture, the 'world' is no longer confined to just one or two places; it has spread worldwide."
"As human beings, we have an innate need to create and innovate from within ourselves to address our own concerns."
"As a writer, I believe that showing or letting readers feel is often more convincing than telling, and imagery allows me to accomplish just that."
"Peace is the ultimate achievement to realize in life."
"Poets are the most difficult creatures to work with."
"As humans, we seek ways to fill gaps in our lives through love, food, pleasure, challenges, and more."
"Nepal is my home, a land of many wonders, but the greatest of them all is its unparalleled diversity and rich heritage.”"
"As my childhood got opportunity to grow up amidst variety of geography and people practicing different cultures, I could experience the very essence of our diversity."
"Poetry is part of our culture in many ways."
"I am quite sure that poetry will live long with our generations to come."
"Love, compassion, humanity are values which are irreplaceable."
"The Taj Mahal is not just a monument, but a symbol of love."
"We cannot imagine a mind without body."
"Because she lived under the big umbrella of my grandfather and she didn't have any education - she had three kids, had been abandoned by her husband, had no money - it was a horrible life. The only way she could get attention from her father or anybody else was by being sick. She didn't do it consciously. As a child I felt impotent and guilty because I felt that I couldn't help her in any way."
"Thank God – because what are you going to write about if you don’t struggle as a child? I don’t think that you become creative because you have struggled, no, but creative people are fuelled by anger and passion, and haunted by demons and memories."
"It would have been much better if I had started [writing novels] at 19. But I couldn't. I had to support a family, I wasn't ready. And I think I needed to lose my country to start writing, because The House of the Spirits is an attempt to recreate the country I had lost, the family I had lost."
"The theme of displacement is very natural for me. It always comes up in my books because I have been a foreigner all my life and I don’t feel I belong anywhere. I’m an immigrant."
"I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past."
"I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing."
"I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation."
"Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes."
"…Research is always involved, to make sure details, language and atmosphere feel right. Then comes the hard work of a writer, which is the writing itself. One sentence leads to another and then another… You try to maintain focus and discipline, writing for as long as you can, everyday until you’re done with a draft. Then you go back and start revising and the mysterious creative process begins all over again. Each time you begin, you hopefully go deeper into your story and your characters and end up surprising yourself."
"By saying that all my characters have a little bit of me in them, I mean that I try to be invested and empathetic in all my characters—whether they are principal or secondary, deeply flawed and not very “nice.” If you’re in tune with your story then the characters do come at you organically. There isn’t an order to how they might appear."
"Filipino writers who write in English should be at an advantage in terms of connecting with international readers, but the irony is that their work isn't really known to the rest of the world. As for me, writing in Tagalog has never been a real option. It's too complex. Just because I can speak the language (somewhat) doesn't mean that I can write in Tagalog with any eloquence or authority."
"The work involved in writing a novel is completely solitary, unlike playwriting. And the struggle is often painful. There is no one to turn to but yourself. You confront your own demons in order to dig deep and come up with something risky and powerful. Playwriting is the exact opposite process for me because it's so collaborative. If you're blessed with a terrific cast, a visionary director, an innovative sound and design team, then your play has a ninety-nine percent chance of being realized in the best possible way. I think people forget -- even some of my most aware graduate students! -- that writing is hard work. Period."
"I think it’s easier to honor the male in our culture because it’s much more accepted. There are almost no truly powerful and sustained images of female power. None. Look at Marilyn Monroe? The Virgin Mary? And what images exist for Indian women? The big question is, How do we describe ourselves as women in this culture? It’s unclear."
"The left blames white nationalism. The right blames mental illness. Neither explains that it happens often here and nowhere else. But mass shootings account for a very small number of gun deaths: Many more women are killed in their home by guns. Men used to just knock women around, but rarely did death result. But with a gun on hand, there's a death. Half of the gun deaths are suicide. The proliferation of guns is a huge problem, but its cause is not lack of regulations. There were lots of regulations in the '70s when this started; going postal and school shootings started in the '70s."
"This rise of the Second Amendment is almost a time bomb that was planted in the Constitution. A mandate for the legality of settler violence and settler sovereignty. What's that right about? It's about taking all the property. They're a vestige, but they're very powerful. They have a voice in the presidency and in the Congress."
"I was also becoming more and more troubled by male chauvinism in the movement… Returning to the United States and organizing in the Boston area, I got angrier and angrier at men in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the anti-draft movement, the motto of which was, “Girls say yes to boys who say no.” I hadn’t felt oppressed so much directly, but of course I was, although I had been treated as a kind of “honorary” man. Once I started taking a feminist stand I got condemned. It was pretty hard to take at the time. And male chauvinism had terrible consequences for the women’s movement and for the development of the left, because it took some of the strongest feminists out of the Left and made the Left unwelcoming to newly politicized young women."
"I think Marxism is a hard sell in the Native movement and for African Americans but less so for Mexican Americans because of their political genealogies. Today it’s even difficult for Chicanos, as well as Native Americans, because Marxism is deemed just Western epistemology or a Western worldview. There is of course a lot of Eurocentrism in Marx’s early writings. There is the idea of progress, but people don’t look at his later work enough, when he was getting into ethnology…"
"There’s a disconnect between how people imagine their families and how families are in real life."
"They’re supposed to be the people who support you, who love you no matter what, and the reality is they’re the first people who teach you to cast doubt on yourself, they’re the first people who sometimes don’t have your back…"
Showing 50 of 52 quotes