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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 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

History

Believe

Books

" 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 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! "

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

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Just

Eat

" I've been treated beautifully wherever I've gone, and I really think we all want to love each other. "

" 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. "

" I am actually a 'Seven Samurai' fan. "

" Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Expectations

Kind

" 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. "

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

See

People

" To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Pray

Prayer

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

Two

Divide

" 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. "

" 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. "

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