Miguel Syjuco Quotes & Sayings

Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that's where writers must try to be artful. — Miguel Syjuco

I grew up with a very privileged background. My father served as one of the cabinet ministers in Arroyo's government, and he's been a congressman for many years, and he's running again. — Miguel Syjuco

Here, need blurs the line between good and bad, and a constant promise of random violence sticks like humidity down your back. — Miguel Syjuco

How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person? — Miguel Syjuco

The little things, you know, eventually become everything. — Miguel Syjuco

He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities. — Miguel Syjuco

I studied in New York. I fell in love with an Australian-born, half-Filipina girl. So we moved to Australia when she went to her university and I moved with her. We moved to Montreal because she was going to take her year abroad, and I wanted to see if I could keep on writing there. It's really hard to make it as a writer in the Philippines. — Miguel Syjuco

I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change. — Miguel Syjuco

The Philippines, it has a politics of patronage. Family and favors, in addition to the old cliche of guns, goons and gold, really do still hold a lot of sway. — Miguel Syjuco

I've learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn't be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus. — Miguel Syjuco

Guilt is often assumed before innocence can be proven. — Miguel Syjuco

When I was young, I spent my days and nights trying to impress future generations. I spent them. They're gone. All because I was deathly afraid of being forgotten. And then came the regret. The worst things of all worst things. — Miguel Syjuco

I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet. — Miguel Syjuco

I surprise myself that I'm not dead in the gutter somewhere, surprised that I haven't given up. — Miguel Syjuco

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband. — Miguel Syjuco

A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have. — Miguel Syjuco

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas ... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation. — Miguel Syjuco

What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don't have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience. — Miguel Syjuco

My absence was gradual, until one day it was complete. — Miguel Syjuco

A writer has to talk about the things that go untalked about — Miguel Syjuco

How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions — Miguel Syjuco

Whatever they may say, your story is truly your own. You have a responsibility to it, the way a father has to a child — Miguel Syjuco

You can't bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I'm hardly speaking in metaphor. It's the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that? — Miguel Syjuco

With 'Ilustrado,' I set out to change the way we read literature, and I think I failed spectacularly. In fact, I know I failed. In reaching further than I could, I may not have produced a life- or literature-changing book, but I did produce one I am proud of. — Miguel Syjuco

I don't believe in nationalism. I think it's a bunch of slogans. It's a bunch of poor attempts at creating pride. My problem with nationalism is that it becomes exclusionary. We start to exclude people. — Miguel Syjuco

I once thought that The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I'm not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what's in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you'll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don't get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole. — Miguel Syjuco

I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough. — Miguel Syjuco

Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale — Miguel Syjuco

When you're unhappy with your life, you become more selfish with it. — Miguel Syjuco

Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths. — Miguel Syjuco

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life. — Miguel Syjuco

Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go. — Miguel Syjuco

Children sometimes know best and we chide them for being precocious. Then we grow aged and become again like children, and they call us wise. — Miguel Syjuco

Because falling, if you live in the moment,is really just flying, at least until you read the ground — Miguel Syjuco

How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp? — Miguel Syjuco

I love my homeland, but it's an absurd country. Politics in the Philippines is like spectator sports! — Miguel Syjuco

Cliches remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that other have trod this ground long ago. — Miguel Syjuco

We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity
governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity wit which we rendered them. — Miguel Syjuco

How did we become so prejudiced by our idiosyncrasies? ... We shared the same languages, but spoke of worlds so subtly different that language was not enough. Over time the big things were left unsaid; they gave way to the little things, those once-endearing imperfections that had somewhere become deal breakers. — Miguel Syjuco

There is that potential of the expats coming back to the Philippines. But sadly they are no opportunities, no incentive for them to come back home. Successive governments have, in fact, been training them to export them rather than working on the economy to welcome them home. — Miguel Syjuco

Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get. — Miguel Syjuco

The Miguel Syjuco character is not me. I wanted him to represent my own fears and frustrations and guilt, my own worst tendencies and my optimistic expectations. He's a cautionary tale for me. But he's also an examination of the darkest things that haunt me as a person. — Miguel Syjuco

Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love. — Miguel Syjuco

The instant before something comes into focus is more exciting than any sharp certainty. Photography, child, is about the passing of time. Capturing is the goal of literature. Timelessness is the task of music and painting. But a good photograph holds time just as a vase holds water. The water will evaporate and the vase becomes a memorial to it. What separates a snapshot from a masterpiece is that the latter is a metaphor of patience ... — Miguel Syjuco

Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective. — Miguel Syjuco

Just because an ideology dies doesn't mean the value of its ideas is nullified — Miguel Syjuco

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on 'Ilustrado.' — Miguel Syjuco

As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family — Miguel Syjuco

I read a blog about this young filmmaker in the Philippines who made a short film, and one of the characters in the film reads my novel and then starts discussing the novel with someone. The idea that my book can inspire another artist and be part of that other artist's work ... that's the reason I write. — Miguel Syjuco

Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying. — Miguel Syjuco

I don't see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute. — Miguel Syjuco

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves. — Miguel Syjuco

Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life. — Miguel Syjuco

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves. — Miguel Syjuco

Love isn't based on gratitude. Respect isn't based on debt. — Miguel Syjuco

Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world? — Miguel Syjuco

The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective. — Miguel Syjuco

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building. — Miguel Syjuco

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth. — Miguel Syjuco

We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand. — Miguel Syjuco

When you hate someone so much, a part of you wants desperately to forgive them. But you can't decide if it's because you really want, or if you just want to stop hating. I still don't know if forgiveness is generous or selfish. Maybe both. — Miguel Syjuco

Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World. — Miguel Syjuco

morality... comes at a price. — Miguel Syjuco

And yet,from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live. — Miguel Syjuco

I learned much from Crispin, though a lot of the things he went on about passed over my head. But he was one of those teachers who, by a kind of osmosis, helped you discover the quantity of areas in your life in which you are still so ignorant as not to have even considered forming a wrong opinion. — Miguel Syjuco

You were so beautiful when you were young. So much idealism it was inspiring. — Miguel Syjuco

I'm making this confession without hope for absolution.
One morning, I pretended to go crazy. Perhaps in pretending, I proved myself so. — Miguel Syjuco

Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it — Miguel Syjuco

A man with battered hands is shown to be a craftsman only when he puts them to work. — Miguel Syjuco

Sometimes one waits too long for the perfect moment before snapping the picture. You never realize that you needed was to change perspective. — Miguel Syjuco

If I were to go back to the Philippines, I would probably end up teaching creative writing at a university. I wouldn't be able to write, for I would become too jaded to be able to view the existing situation objectively. — Miguel Syjuco

To be angry implies you care — Miguel Syjuco

Fiction, however, sometimes ensures disappointment with reality — Miguel Syjuco

All of humanity's crimes,' Salvador said ... 'are only degrees of theft. — Miguel Syjuco

'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness ... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too. — Miguel Syjuco

A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father. — Miguel Syjuco

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow
the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago — Miguel Syjuco

I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue. — Miguel Syjuco

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness. — Miguel Syjuco

When you live in the Philippines or a country like that, you develop something of a very thick skin because you're confronted every day with all of the problems all around you. — Miguel Syjuco

Love and honesty don't mix. — Miguel Syjuco

Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we'll be. — Miguel Syjuco

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world. — Miguel Syjuco

Perhaps we have stopped ourselves from being invented, from self-realization, by blaming others for our wordlessness. — Miguel Syjuco

I transform fiction into memory. — Miguel Syjuco

There are only three truths. That which can be known. That which can never be known. The third, which concerns the writer alone, truly is neither of these. — Miguel Syjuco