65 Quotes by Daniel Alarcón

My first and last love will always be fiction. It’s the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. I love the novel because it’s like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it’s going to take you.

How emigration is actually lived – well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.

I’m a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela’s famous novel ‘The Underdogs,’ and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

I guess in my own life I don’t really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don’t sit around thinking, “How am I supposed to be a man?” I don’t think that I have to prove anything.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I’m psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I’m not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that’s important.

Ask any human being alive if they’re the same person they were seven years ago and they’re going to tell you they aren’t.

Writing an op-ed feels like I’m taking the SAT. It’s so hard. It feels like homework. And if it feels like homework, it just doesn’t get done.

What I’m most interested in is not necessarily the wound, but the scar. Not how someone is wounded, but what the scar does later.

Publication in ‘The New Yorker’ meant everything, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.