Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes
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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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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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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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To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time.
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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 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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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'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 am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.
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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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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 had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns.
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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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People think of me as a political writer, but I don't think of myself that way.
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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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'The Hummingbird's Daughter' took 20 years to write.
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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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With a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, it's political no matter what I do.
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Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me.
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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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Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory.
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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.