Gustavo Perez Firmat Quotes

#1. Let's always love each other, and never be in love with each other.

David Levithan

#2. My father's death took me to a place I had never been and a place I had never left. In his absence, I've had to rely more on myself.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#3. My writing, such as it is, grows out of my sense of discolation, I mean, dislocation. Having lost my place, I write to find my place, or to find once again that I have lost my place.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#4. Every book I think will be my last one because after finishing I have the sense that I've said all I have to say, but I always seem to find a new way of repeating myself.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#5. The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I'm going to damn well be this person that I've set my heart on being.

Salman Rushdie

#6. The things we do are the most important things of all. They are more important than what we say or what we look like. The things we do outlast our mortality. The things we do are like monuments that people build to honor heroes after they've died.

R.J. Palacio

#7. I read fiction all the time. It's true that I don't like fantasy or science fiction. I like "realistic" novels, particularly those in which nothing much ever happens.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#8. I was born in Cuba but was made in the USA.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#9. Is there anything fairer than morning?" she murmured, not expecting an answer.
He was quiet for a moment. "I can think of three things.

Rosslyn Elliott

#10. For me the path to the literary goes through the non - literary. For this reason it surprises me that I am a writer, or that people speak of me as a writer. I'm flattered, but I don't quite believe it.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#11. Literature is breathing. I teach literature the way someone else might teach First Aid.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#12. That's Lalasa, Kel's maid. She sews and knows all sorts of ways to hurt you.

Tamora Pierce

#13. I am a loner by nature, and then I'm a writer, which makes me twice a loner.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#14. That's wrong, Mrs. Winning was thinking, you mustn't ever talk about whether people like you, that's bad taste.

Shirley Jackson

#15. I thought he wanted it, anyway," I say.
"Not like this," Haymitch says. "He wanted it to be real.

Suzanne Collins

#16. I say that being a smart writer doesn't make you a good writer. There's obviously a difference between talent and intelligence. And it may be that at some point intelligence begins to impinge on talent, or talent on intelligence.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#17. The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#18. There's a Cuban saying: Bicho malo nunca muere. Loose translation: The good die young but the wicked live forever. It seems to apply to Fidel. I hope it applies to me.

Gustavo Perez Firmat

#19. If you want to be like me, work hard and believe in it, and if you don't believe in it, get rid of it.

Steve Bunce