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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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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" We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Borders are liminal spaces. Anyone worthy of the title of 'writer' is a border writer. We all are border people. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Writers write without support. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I often say poetry was my first love. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" With a name like Luis Alberto Urrea, it's political no matter what I do. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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! "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" There is beauty in our roots. Sometimes we think our roots are shameful, and people tell you that you're no good or your ancestors are no good or that you come from a neighborhood of no hope and terrible crime. But it's about the beauty of those places, and I carry that with me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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.' "

Luis Alberto Urrea