Fantasy Authors

"something that interests me is the fact that we continue to document things even if it's after the fact, even if it's a hundred years after the fact, to show that there were other voices, other points of view. I continue to do my work in historical fiction, but whoever we are and wherever we're living, the events around us continue to influence our view of history and we each continue to rewrite history in our own way. There is no set history. Each of us brings a new history to bear...I've done so much research with what's considered history that I've decided that it's just as fictional as fiction is. And many of the truths that I'm interested in telling need to be told in a narrative form, which history or anthropology or some other disciplines doesn't necessarily lend themselves to. People need to hear things in a certain way in order to understand them, and so I think that fiction in many ways tells truths that history is unable to tell."

"(What is your advice to Latinex writers?) Don’t devalue your own stories. Two of my role models are Ana Castillo and Denise Chavez, who draw on their backgrounds for the work they do. They are fearless. I look at them and know I have no excuse. For years I wondered who had given Castillo permission to write? I wanted to ask her in person. By the time I met her, I realized she gave herself permission. Apparently, that was what I was waiting for, for someone to say, it’s okay. Well, I gave myself permission, and it’s okay."

"Once you start talking about people as individuals, which I try to do in my fiction, it's impossible to say that any group of people can be excluded from full human rights."

"Maybe that's the kind of thing you find out when you get older, that these cycles repeat themselves through the generations, how we respond to our relationships with our families, and how they're mirrored in the language we speak and we in turn pass that on to our children."

"Since we were in church half the time, I used to sit there and read the Bible, which, like Shakespeare, encompasses most of the human condition."

"I never made a distinction between realistic and magic realistic writing. The first book I read that probably fell into the accepted canon of magic realism was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, maybe in 1972 or ’73. I remember I found a copy in Spanish later and sent it to my parents, because it was so like our family stories. I also made my husband read it before we married, so that he would understand what sort of a family he was getting into."

"I grew up on the edge of the Mojave Desert in a very rural part of southern California until I was six years old, when we moved into town. Every time I start writing a new piece, I write a description of that landscape; it’s as if I have to ground myself in those very early memories and relationship to the land before I move on to the next thing."

"I got very obsessed with documenting nineteenth-century family life and our relationship to history because I meet so many people who feel we have no foundation in history. We had to reinvent history after the Mexican Revolution. We have sort of cobbled together a history out of what we know and our place in the United States, which included, from all of society that surrounded us and brought us up, this notion that you are not worth anything; you are at the bottom of society. And so I think it's important that we see that we have roots that go deep into the earth here, in the United States and Mexico and in Spain, and all of this is something we can claim as our own heritage. That's certainly how I take it. Rather than being confined to being a mall rat in Southern California, I claim all of this as my heritage. I guess I would like other people to see that as well."

"People had big families in those days. And the thing we need to remember about them, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which is still true in most of Mexico, is that your family is your treasure. You may not have anything else, but people really value children"

"One of the anthropological terms I've learned that applies to all of these peoples is this notion of syncretism, that cultures and religions come together and forge new cultures and new religions and new languages. And this is really the sign of a living culture and a living history. People are trying to preserve the past and aren't happy with other people if they aren't doing everything the same way that their parents and grandparents [did them], and they'll say, "Oh, that's wrong. You're not doing it right." But the fact that languages change and people change and adapt to new environments is the sign of a living culture to me. I certainly mourn the loss of the heritage that has fallen by the wayside because it was tied directly to landscape. When people moved from the land, they lost that. I also have to admire the spirit of endurance that made people continue to remember."

"what I'm writing about in each of these novels is the notion that these are people who look around at the society they live in or the culture they live in and say, "This isn't necessarily where I belong. I need to change my place in history and I need to change my place in this culture.""

"I'm really interested in is this notion that when you read histories and when you read official documentations of countries and people, they tend to be very much on the macro level. When I did the research on nineteenth-century Mexico, you can find out where all the railroads ran, you can find out the front lines of all the battles, of all the wars, but you can't find out things like how women actually prepared meals in the home every day. That was much harder to find. The outward history, the official history, is easy to find. But the little things of how families interacted were much more difficult to research and I had to dig a little deeper."

"She had her sights set on being an English major. Owen admired the quixotic nature of her plan, its blatant impracticality, its vow of poverty."

"There is no certainty but that there is no certainty."

"People did sometimes leave town, though. Because no one knew where they went didn’t necessarily mean they’d been abducted, killed, and drained by a vampire."

"I had, at the time, an irrational, Luddite inclination that there was something morally bankrupt about making art with a computer."

"My choice of dog was the quarter pounder. That’s right, the Hindenburg of Wawa processed meat products. Two of those and you were doing a half pound of sodium nitrates (is that the stuff they use for explosives?) and animal by-products with a little food coloring added. This stuff can’t be good for you. Even while I was biting into these things, I was picturing a third eye growing in my asshole. It was Russian roulette and I was putting the barrel to my head at least twice a day. I’d become addicted to hot dogs while on the rebound from cigarettes."

"The semester began, and I soon discovered that abstract painting was still the order of the day at the university. Most of the professors had come of age in their own work during the late fifties and sixties and were still channeling the depleted spirit of Jackson Pollock; second- and third-rate abstract expressionists tutoring young painters in the importance of ignoring the figure. The canvases were vast, the paint apply liberally, and the bigger the mess the more praise the piece garnered."

"An honor it was, too, as he told me, “You know that because you don’t get paid anything for it.”"

"“There is only one term for this war,” said the old man with the sunglasses. “‘Clusterfuck.’ Cluster as in ‘cluster’ and fuck as in ‘fuck.’ No more need be said.”"

"After my mother finally quit drinking, she entered a brief epoch of peace in her life. Gone were the paranoia, the accusations, the belittlements, the bitter rage of judgment, the look of fear. For years, nearly every day a lost weekend, she had been possessed by the dark amber ghast of gag-sweet Taylor Cream Sherry. Living with her back then had been like living with a vampire whose bite drained but never conferred immortality."

"Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years suddenly beginning to rise around me."

"Nothing is more comforting to people than to have their certainties trumpeted back to them in bold, clear typeface."

"The wind and sun, the salt water, the hard work aged a body rapidly, and when I would look at the old man who clammed, I was too young to sense the wisdom their years on the water had bestowed upon them and saw only what I did not want to become."

"The lion is fur, muscle, tendon, claw, and speed, five important ingredients of the unfathomable."

"Parents—so essential yet sometimes like something you have stepped in and cannot get off your shoe. What else is there but to love them?"

"“I understand the human brain. It’s a double-edged sword. An evolutionarily development that gives you the wherewithal to know that life is basically a shit pastry one is obliged to eat slowly, and the ability to disguise that fact with beautiful delusions.” “Where do God and the cash come in?” asked Slackwell. “The cash is the pastry part. God, he just likes to watch us eat. The more we eat the more he loves us. You can’t live without love.”"

"My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common."

"“You gotta watch that anger. The customer’s always right,” said Merk. “The customer’s hardly ever right,” said Slackwell."

"If he’s not crazy, he’s probably playing with your mind. He seems to have a healthy measure of mischief about him. That string tie is a good indicator."

"Between Heaven and Hell there is this place called reality. Reality might as well be Hell if you don’t have cash."

"Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy."

"Real memories intrude now and then as do self-admonitions for a wasted life, but the smoke’s other feature is that it lets you not give a shit about anything but taking in more smoke."

"Life was never so clear-cut as to offer anything as certain as a war between Heaven and Hell. That was for stories."

"He kneels and prays to heaven but nothing happens."

"“Can you think of anything, my dear Mr. Fell, more intricately complex, more perfectly compact and thoroughly functional than the human eye?” “No, sir,” said August. “I thought not,” said Larchcroft. “Consider this, though. Our eyes were created by light. Without the existence of light, we would not have eyes. Over the long course of man’s evolutionarily maturation to his modern condition, light sculpted these magical orbs, making subtle adjustments through the centuries, until now they are capable of the incredible process of sight. This most vital sense, not only a means of self-preservation but the single most important catalyst for culture, is a product of the inherent genius of light.”"

"What good is the illusion of fiction if it cannot show us a way to become the people we need to be?"

"In their exquisite self-centeredness our ancestors believed that they were alone in the universe. At the same time, they had convinced themselves that Earth was the blue apple of God’s eye and the sole reason for all of creation. This two-headed fallacy caused humanity both delusions of grandeur and a paranoiac sense of loneliness."

"A slight grin that has nothing to do with merriment is the sure sign that she is about to set things straight. Her overall air is one of constant suspicion, and ever readiness to take offense."

"He’s no physician, he’s Grandfather Mess. He couldn’t cure a pain in the ass unless he left the room."

"“My dear Philosopher,” said the countess. “You give sanity a bad name.”"

"What followed was the well-known phenomenon of a group, asked a simple question with an obvious answer, that nevertheless remains silent as everybody waits for somebody else to trigger a suspected rhetorical trap."

"I’m going to die. But that meant nothing, too, because we were all going to die, and every breath of air I managed to wrest from the universe was one more the nightmares of my childhood had failed to deny me. When I breathed it was an act of defiance. When I breathed it was a victory."

"It’s almost comical. Nobody knew anything, but everybody took that as proof of the hypothesis."

"He’d played me very well. He’s sensed my misanthropy, and played up that aspect of his own personality. He’d even accused the Porrinyards of the same failing. But was that just the typical gamesmanship of a habitual manipulator, or the obfuscation of a sociopath?"

"“You know what murder investigators call the ex-lover who says the dead woman slept around?” “I think I can guess.” “The most likely suspect.”"

"It was stupid to feel fear. Fear was nothing but the body’s involuntary response to perceived threats. Fear increased heartbeat, respiration, and perspiration; fear clouded the mind and paralyzed the limbs, and I’m going to die wasn’t subject to logical arguments about its counterproductivity."

"“In my experience, mediocrity in life-or-death situations gets people killed.” He looked knowing. “Read your history. Greatness kills more.” There was nothing I could say to that."

"“Are you refusing a direct order?” “Tell me to die for no good reason and I’ll do more than refuse, I’ll shove the order up your ass.”"

"She’s a little bit below mediocre, isn’t she? And the worst kind of below-par personality at that: the kind who believes herself destined for great things."