Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes
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I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.'
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During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
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Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one.
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We're all funny. Humor unites us.
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To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time.
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I saw 'The War Wagon' with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but it was dubbed into German. And it had Japanese subtitles and then this little strip with some Spanish words, and I've never forgotten that weird image. It was so magical and funky.
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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!
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.
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I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.
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We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.
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With a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, it's political no matter what I do.
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People think of me as a political writer, but I don't think of myself that way.
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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.
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I had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns.
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My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic.
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It became really important to me if I was going to write 'Hummingbird's Daughter' to try to do honor to women.
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I missed the Wilco phenom while busy obsessing over rock en Espanol. So imagine my surprise when I found myself at O'Hare getting on a plane with my Chi-town homeboy, Jeff Tweedy. I loved the guy right away and loved his family. How odd to know somebody before you listen to them. I don't know if that's bad or good.
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Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
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'The Hummingbird's Daughter' took 20 years to write.
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Writers write without support.
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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.