Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes
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I am actually a 'Seven Samurai' fan.
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To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time.
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When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.
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It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.
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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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We're all funny. Humor unites us.
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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 am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.
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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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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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People think of me as a political writer, but I don't think of myself that way.
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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 had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns.
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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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With a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, it's political no matter what I do.
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We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.
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I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.
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It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.
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I've been told not to tour down in Mexico. I am too well-known now. The kidnappers may think that my publisher will pay a ransom.
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'The Hummingbird's Daughter' took 20 years to write.
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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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Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.
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The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.
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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.