Quote collection
322 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it."
"I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason."
"Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men."
"I'm not willing to sign a contract. They want everything. They want the rights to do the movie and everything else they can think of, forever. There's no limit to the contract. In this universe and universes to be discovered - I'm not making this up - this is in the contract."
"I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time."
"Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly."
"I have been a woman for 46 years and I only recently realized I can't change it and I like it."
"It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional."
"You would give your life for your little baby. It's not the same when you are in a sexual relationship unless you feel that you are loved as you love."
"The media could do a much better job, that's for sure, especially the media that targets women... Human rights? They couldn't care less!"
"People come from internally, from other places in the United States, but also displaced people from other parts of the world. They come here. If you walk in the streets of San Francisco, you hear all the languages. You smell all the foods. You listen to the music from everywhere. There's great diversity."
"The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses."
"I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody."
"Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story."
"I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there."
"I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy."
"I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?"
"His calls for justice were lost at the mercy of the wind and human indifference."
"This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need chartiy; they need justice."
"I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me."