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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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" When 'The Hummingbird's Daughter' came out, there was a certain backlash - 'Well, this isn't 'The Devil's Highway.'' That's just the way it goes. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Well

Out

Daughter

" The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. "

" I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write. "

" I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war. "

" Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Just

Eat

" I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed. "

" I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.' "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Titles

Books

" Writers write without support. "

" I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about. "

" Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing. "

" I had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns. "

" Many of us writers tour like a literary Bachman Turner Overdrive. We ain't pretty, but we're on the road. Many of us wish we were rock stars anyway. For my part, I live in my iPod. The musicians there are my constant companions on the road. "

" It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them. "

" The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles. "

" Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives. "

" Writing went from being a calling to being a job. Business ruined things. It became like making sausages in a sausage factory. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I came to believe the green fuse that drives spring and summer through the world is essentially a literary energy. That the world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing - and that thing was story. "

" When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis. "

" I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Wrestling

Father

" People think of me as a political writer, but I don't think of myself that way. "

" I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

See

People

" I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery. "

" During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans. "

" When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy. "

" The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could. "

" I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it. "