45 Quotes by Alma Guillermoprieto

I tried to reconstruct just how and why I had stopped dancing years earlier. The turning point for that decision was a six-month sojourn teaching dance in Cuba back in 1970.

I read a lot. And both of my parents, I think, would have wanted to be writers. It's funny how one ends up doing the things that-that parents-perhaps, the dreams that parents couldn't fulfill. I know that my mother would have been beyond herself to have had a story published in The New Yorker.

But we all dream of, you know, the great novel that we will write some day when we have time. And it's probably not happening.

I believe in reincarnation and communication with the spirits. But I also believe in the founding principles of Marxism-Leninism. Where is it written that you have to be coherent?

These kids who have no place in the world, who nobody has ever made room for, look at least for a place in time, in the present through fashion. It's vitally important to them to look right. When they get money from a job, they spend it immediately on something for their mothers and on clothes. Of course they're not going to have any respect for their fathers, in their shabby old backcountry suits!

A left-wing guerrilla is somebody who belongs to an organization that by now is 30 or 40 years old. There are several guerrilla groups in Colombia, not just one. And they more or less adhere to a Maoist or a traditional Cuban approach to revolution.

And in fact, I dream in whatever language I'm living in. So that, you know, after six months of being in the States, I started dreaming in English again. And when I moved back to Mexico, after a few months, I started dreaming in Spanish again.

Investigative reporting is the bone structure without which the journalistic body collapses. The Center for Public Integrity’s constant and consistently enterprising investigative work is an invaluable contribution not only to journalism, but to society and to a healthy democracy.

There is no point to samba if it doesn’t make you smile.