Top 47 Daniel Alarcon Quotes
#1. Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade.
Daniel Alarcon
#2. Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking
only that facts were merely a point of departure for her.
Daniel Alarcon
#3. Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
Daniel Alarcon
#4. When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
Daniel Alarcon
#5. A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off.
Daniel Alarcon
#6. Heartbreak is like shattered glass: while it's impossible that two pieces could splinter in precisely the same pattern, in he end, it doesn't matter, because the effect is identical.
Daniel Alarcon
#7. For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
Daniel Alarcon
#8. Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another.
Daniel Alarcon
#9. Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.
Daniel Alarcon
#10. The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it.
Daniel Alarcon
#11. I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
Daniel Alarcon
#12. Ask any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.
Daniel Alarcon
#13. I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column.
Daniel Alarcon
#14. It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.
Daniel Alarcon
#15. I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
Daniel Alarcon
#16. They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool.
Daniel Alarcon
#17. You don't sound like a scientist, you sound like a poet."
Rey smiled, "Can I be both?"
But you'd rather be a poet."
Who wouldn't?" he said.
Daniel Alarcon
#18. The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.
That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.
Daniel Alarcon
#19. I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.
Daniel Alarcon
#20. I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
Daniel Alarcon
#21. That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.
Daniel Alarcon
#22. The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.
Daniel Alarcon
#23. I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.
Daniel Alarcon
#24. I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.
Daniel Alarcon
#25. I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.
Daniel Alarcon
#26. I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.
Daniel Alarcon
#27. I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
Daniel Alarcon
#28. A man should cause an impression," she said. "He should leave you with something to think about. Without that, there's no magic.
Daniel Alarcon
#29. I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
Daniel Alarcon
#30. Writing an op-ed feels like I'm taking the SAT. It's so hard. It feels like homework. And if it feels like homework, it just doesn't get done.
Daniel Alarcon
#31. When I was younger, I was able to write with music playing in the background, but these days, I can't. I find it distracting. Even when the music is just instrumental or has lyrics in a language I don't understand, the clash between the voices in my head and the song can be very disorienting.
Daniel Alarcon
#32. What does the end of a war mean if not that one side ran out of men willing to die?
Daniel Alarcon
#33. Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.
Daniel Alarcon
#34. I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
Daniel Alarcon
#35. How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.
Daniel Alarcon
#36. At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say.
Daniel Alarcon
#37. Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.
Daniel Alarcon
#38. Are you a politician?
I hate politicians, he said. And, in any case, there's no such thing anymore: only sycophants and dissidents.
Daniel Alarcon
#40. The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it at once more subtle and more powerful than science.
Daniel Alarcon
#41. I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.
Daniel Alarcon
#42. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? ...
The war had become, it it wasn't from the beginning, an indecipherable text.
Daniel Alarcon
#43. I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.
Daniel Alarcon
#44. He admired this too: their ability to preserve joy at any cost, the way prehistoric man might have preserved fire.
Daniel Alarcon
#45. As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn't made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.
Daniel Alarcon
#46. What I'm most interested in is not necessarily the wound, but the scar. Not how someone is wounded, but what the scar does later.
Daniel Alarcon
#47. Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That's half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.
Daniel Alarcon
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