Daniel Alarcon Quotes & Sayings

A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it at once more subtle and more powerful than science. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools. — Daniel Alarcon

That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities. — Daniel Alarcon

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated. — Daniel Alarcon

There are stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside. — Daniel Alarcon

I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer. — Daniel Alarcon

It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art. — Daniel Alarcon

He imagined her impressed by his maturity, by his willingness to share her with another man. But this formulation was partial. It did not take into account the fact that she'd loved him, or that he'd broken her heart. It did not consider that her heart might be broken still, or that every time they slept together, it broke a little more. — Daniel Alarcon

I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country. — Daniel Alarcon

Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work. — Daniel Alarcon

Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another. — Daniel Alarcon

The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.
That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go. — Daniel Alarcon

I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column. — Daniel Alarcon

As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn't made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different. — Daniel Alarcon

At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say. — Daniel Alarcon

A man should cause an impression," she said. "He should leave you with something to think about. Without that, there's no magic. — Daniel Alarcon

Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can't afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don't have the habit of reading novels. — Daniel Alarcon

And what does he feel?"
"He feels uneasy. A little afaid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride."
"Good," Henry said. "ANd where are you?"
"Backstage."
Henry shook his head gravely. "THere's no such thing as backstage. The play begins, and there's only the world it dramatizes. Now, where are you?"
"With my father, the president. In his chambers."
"Right. With me. Your father. And now
this is important
do you love me?"
Nelson considered this; or rather, Nelson, as Alejo, considered this.
"Yes," he said after a moment. "I do."
"Good. Remember that. In every scene
even when you hate me, you also love me. That's why it hurts. Got it?"
Nelson said that he did.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Good. Because it does hurt," Henry said. "DOn't forget that. It's supposed to. Always. — Daniel Alarcon

They spoke of the crowds that had filled the plaza: the people, always myopic, always easy to fool. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it. — Daniel Alarcon

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language. — Daniel Alarcon

Are you a politician?
I hate politicians, he said. And, in any case, there's no such thing anymore: only sycophants and dissidents. — Daniel Alarcon

Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption. — Daniel Alarcon

Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That's half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

Luz's manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn't that she made things up, strictly speaking
only that facts were merely a point of departure for her. — Daniel Alarcon

I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece. — Daniel Alarcon

You don't sound like a scientist, you sound like a poet."
Rey smiled, "Can I be both?"
But you'd rather be a poet."
Who wouldn't?" he said. — Daniel Alarcon

The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern. — Daniel Alarcon

Nothing builds community like complaining. — Daniel Alarcon

I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru. — Daniel Alarcon

Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book. — Daniel Alarcon

When I was younger, I was able to write with music playing in the background, but these days, I can't. I find it distracting. Even when the music is just instrumental or has lyrics in a language I don't understand, the clash between the voices in my head and the song can be very disorienting. — Daniel Alarcon

I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies. — Daniel Alarcon

There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth
hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, the filmmaker was agnostic
he came from money, and couldn't see the urgency. Like many of his ilk, he sometimes confused poverty (which must be eradicated!) with folklore (which must be preserved!), but it was a genuine confusion, without a hint of ill intention, which only made it more infuriating. — Daniel Alarcon

Meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that's what I'm most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure. — Daniel Alarcon

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English. — Daniel Alarcon

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. — Daniel Alarcon

What does the end of a war mean if not that one side ran out of men willing to die? — Daniel Alarcon

I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic. — Daniel Alarcon

Memory is a great deceiver, grief and longing cloud the past, and recollections, even vivid ones, fade. — Daniel Alarcon

What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? ...
The war had become, it it wasn't from the beginning, an indecipherable text. — Daniel Alarcon

Heartbreak is like shattered glass: while it's impossible that two pieces could splinter in precisely the same pattern, in he end, it doesn't matter, because the effect is identical. — Daniel Alarcon

He admired this too: their ability to preserve joy at any cost, the way prehistoric man might have preserved fire. — Daniel Alarcon

I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned. — Daniel Alarcon