98 Quotes by Andrea Hirata

From a building right in front of my windows, I can observe the speed of the sunrises and sunsets. The voices of children playing, laughing, yelling, and crying on the playground crawl up to the eighth floor, where I write. Their voices sound so innocent from a distance.

Happiness is actually found in simple things, such as taking my nephew around the island by bicycle or seeing the stars at night. We go to coffee shops or see airplanes land at the airport.

It's hard to be a minority. People look at you a different way, like you don't belong, and I don't think many people realize just how difficult it is to live as a minority. Where I come from, we learn to tolerate one another. Whether one is of Chinese descent or Malay descent, what matters is we're part of the same country, the same world.

I'm a small-town boy who comes from a traditional family on a tiny island called Belitung. I may not know where I'm going, but I'll always know where to come home to.

Writing is taking a risk, and it is actually fighting invisible and invincible enemies. They are over-confidence, stupidity, expectation and narcissism.

I am the only one who is not married among my siblings.

I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

The treasure of a writer is to maintain their own style.