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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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

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

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

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

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

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

" 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

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Indigenous People

" 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

" We're all funny. Humor unites us. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

Luis Alberto Urrea

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

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

" The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" 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. "

Luis Alberto Urrea