Novelists From The United States

"every writer – or every person that aspires to write – has to become a reader. There’s nothing more beautiful than engaging with a novel, a poem, or an essay. You should not write for others, you should write from the point of authenticity, from your own self, from what you know. You hope that others will be enriched by your writing, but you don’t write for financial reward, recognition, or hitting the “best-seller” list. If you are worried about these things, you’re a different writer, not so much committed to what I think really matters, which is to capture your own voice, to release it and to share it. The most important, what we all struggle with, but is essential, is to be ourselves. As writers, as humans, as friends – to be ourselves."

"I don’t agree that all is lost in translation, but I think a great deal is lost, especially in poetry, where every word seems to hold a universe. Especially, considering the inner-workings of language, in a poem. The musicality, the rhythm, the juxtaposition of words, all of that is very hard to convey. Maybe a short story—or a chapter in a novel—would be easier. On the other hand, we need translators and I think they’re remarkably important. I think they should occupy a prominent place in the history of literature."

"It is so important to learn how other people live; to become familiar with a language that is not your own; to feel like a stranger. You will have great empathy for and great understanding of the world around you."

"One of the difficulties that a lot of people have is that they long for certainty and long for making sense, but few things make sense in the world. Everything is filled with uncertainty, so we have to acknowledge uncertainty in every aspect of our life and especially in writing."

"Almost half of the world believes in wars. Why not change that and make people believe in poetry? Believe in kindness? Believe in encounters? I think it’s our responsibility to invite others and make them feel like they can transform the world."

"I think food is the closest thing we have to memory—to the memory of family gatherings, the memory of your grandmother the cook, or maybe the desire for a certain food you never had. But food is really about memory: the memory of taste, the memory of when you ate the meal. I think a lot of people who left their homelands, a lot of exiles or people who were deprived of food in concentration camps, they always tie food to memory—to memory of who they were."

"Spanish is not only the language of my soul, but it’s the language of the memory, of my emotions, the first language I began to write and to think in."

"literature is the only way to preserve memory. I mean, it's like the queen, the king of the preservation of memory. You look at monuments—I just saw the monument of [Robert E.] Lee—you look at the monument of Sadaam Hussein is gone, a lot of historical monuments are going to be vanished according to wars, earthquakes. The only thing that remains are words."

"Life is sacred, but I also think a book is sacred. The way we bury the Torah speaks in a very symbolic way of the power of words. There is a strong correspondence, and it is the sacredness of beauty and dignity. Although for me, nothing is more sacred than human life. (2016)"

"I think the decoding of things, the passionate intellectual need to understand, is part of Jewish sensibility. (2016)"

"Silence is special when you are reflecting inwardly about who you are, but silence as a tool for political behavior—I think that’s always wrong. There are many kinds of silences. (2015)"

"...love letters that aren't read fade away. ("Cartographies")"

"Quite close together, in the warmness of shared bodies, they dared to dream of the sea. Some imagined it as the deep well of the soul; others sketched it out like the face of a drowned man, weighed down with broken seaweed and shells. (first lines of "First Time to the Sea")"

"She lay hidden, as if she were the very darkness of night. (first line of "Rivers")"

"Poetry has the ability to explore subjects that are often too difficult to simply talk about — for example, torture, violence, and especially gender violence. Poetry is intimate and searches for the essential in the human condition, so topics that have to do with human rights are central for poetry. Poetry is also an art form that searches for truth and justice. (2015)"

"The function of the writer and journalist is to present the truth. Latin America writers have demonstrated that to present the truth is more than an ethical posture for them because they are taking risks that may result in their exile, torture, or death. Many writers have been killed by fascist forces. Others have preferred exile and contribute to the history of their respective countries from the outside. All of them continue to construct new vocabularies that rescue memory and create something beautiful, good, and noble from pain and the most terrible conditions of human existence."

"In the face of fear and death these testimonies say "no" to silence and to the fate of all the people missing in a subhuman and diabolical world. What would the political history of Argentina have been without the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with their white kerchieves embroidered with the initials of their disappeared loved ones? Would the world, so often indifferent and astonished, have learned about the almost 30,000 people who disappeared in Argentina during the "dirty war"? From these spoils, writers, activists, and ordinary citizens constructed a language against authoritarianism, a language that accuses, denounces, and feels; words are the fundamental weapon against indifference, fear, and forgetfulness."

"For me there was happiness in churches, their wax candles giving sermons, their dim lukewarmth, their delicate twilight silence that rustles when the devout make the sign of the cross facing the figure of that barefoot, sweaty man, deathly cold. (first lines of "Wax Candles")"

"My activism in human rights was born from various conditions that came together: I was Jewish, female, and an exile."

"At times of great political repression, literature acquires a powerful function: It legitimizes artistic expression in a totalitarian society whose government prohibits this expression. Women writers, through their words and stories, manage to reaffirm what the greater society has denied. Paradoxically, if patriarchal societies have historically denied the presence of women writers, and also those who write about politics, the existence of extreme conditions due to political and civil violence has allowed these women writers to create and through their texts become visible."

"The Latin American writer of the 1970s, like the journalist, cinematographer, and photographer, is the one who prevents the truth from disappearing, the one who searches for the testimony of eyewitnesses, of the forgotten ones, offering a taste of life and validity to the word. Written literature, oral testimonies, and public performances on forbidden streets demonstrate that Latin America hums with life despite the collective massacres, book burnings, and obligatory silence."

"And we prepared quickly for sleep. The mist crackled in the deep heart of the travelling night. We, too, were of a cross-roads, wounded by the pleasure of watching. We were in Austria and I thought of the wounds of my grandfather and of the music of Mozart, like a stream, like a litany, like a fragrance. Then I learned perhaps to be happy in those hospitable, desolate meadows, because the war had erased every trace of scars and only in certain looks were hollow aches and the calamity of dead children still preserved. (beginning of "The Eiderdown")"

"I think I am a bit like Mistral: always a foreigner, always from somewhere else. (2015)"

"The words, such ample, respectable ladies, were fraught with the possibility of love beyond diminutives. I never stopped writing in Spanish because I could not abandon my essence, the fragile, divine core of my being. It would have meant becoming someone else, frequenting sadness, losing a soul and all the butterflies. I always spoke Spanish, even in my most solemn dreams. I did not want to translate myself."

"To be Jewish in Chile was to be above all a foreigner"

"I dream the dream of stories not yet told and my lips begin to tell them out loud."

"To write meant to always be awake, willing to take risks, full of magic and happiness, eager to create and undo, because life was that way, like words."

"In literature I found the caress, the unguarded pleasure, and the voice that had eluded me in this new country. I turned to books with a passion, almost in desperation, because they consoled me. I saw myself criss-crossing the hallways of the library, ransacking in particular the Spanish section and shelves. I discovered the warmth of words, words that belonged to me alone. I paused along their hills, invented the destinies of those exiled like myself. Above all I loved dictionaries, faithful guardians of my language. Through books I crossed borders. Wasn't Latin America an immense shawl united by a free and beautiful language?"

"Writing is bewitching, like a song or cadence. I arrive at words the way one arrives at spells. Poetry is a story that attaches itself to my feet, my being. Sometimes I will lie down on the earth, invent poems about lost love and fear. Writing is a form of love, of loving and being loved. These aren't words, syllables, or useless alphabets launched by chance or an obsession with speech. Each word wants its own freedom to transform reality into wonder, to create another story, to uncover longings, happiness, the astonishing world between the pen and the shattered paper, limber and fragile. Writing is a way to truth, to telling the truth and tieing it to books, to stone walls."

"...what is essential to art: They create art despite trauma, no matter how heartbreaking. They constantly question the reality in which their texts were born, but above all, they make more beautiful, through words, the failure and pain of existence."

"Writing and culture are very much related to the possibilities of the human imagination. The capacity of language allows the imagination to flow and to transform and mend the world."

"To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal."

"Books unite people and books in translation are the thresholds of other cultures, invitations to travel and to know others."

"It seems that...literature grants us the ability to endure and encompass traumatic and horrifying events, to articulate them through writing and the evocative power of memory...It is a way of articulating the self, as well as the soul. A world without writers would be a world lingering in the shadows of silence...Literature moves us, rescues us from oblivion, and makes us witnesses to our history..literature binds the voices from the most diverse geographies, makes the experiences of women universal, and gives hope to future generations."

"Sometimes I imagine the Torah as the great book of the world handed from person to person and generation to generation so that we may remember what unites us and to help us imagine that in all lands there is the possibility of creating a history and participating in it. Books have the strength to create a mutual complicity between writer and reader and they allow the great human family to celebrate through words the memories of other times and places."

"Magic is another way of looking at the world. Magic cultivates the art of intuition and appreciation for the unexpected. Magic interprets the world through signs. In Latin America people live in a state of magic so I inherited this way of being. (2014)"

"if we don't record this, through language, I feel memory vanishes. It's like almost—who said that, Virginia Woolf or someone—"What you don't put down doesn't exist." And that has been my preoccupation, my obsession, really."

"translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original."

"Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices."

"The translation of art, the translation of poetry, however, is the translation of the spirit. A good translator translates what is not said."

"If America is a grandiose melting pot and multicultural society, then it is also a place that has not fully welcomed its immigrants, especially those of color. It is a place that used to prohibit the speaking of native tongues, and it is a place that racially profiles those whose origin is from elsewhere. A friend recently asked me why I seem so critical of this society that has given me so much. I think that to be critical is to be American. Freedom, complete freedom, includes the right to a dissenting opinion, the right to question an election. However, considering that only 30% of the citizens of the United States vote, it is fair to call the political culture dormant."

"Home is understanding and being understood."

"as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self."

"I think that memory is a form of translation. What motivates the artistic expression of poets and fiction writers, essayists and painters is memory. But memory is also very complicated because it consists of what one chooses to remember."

"Home, for many Jews, was their existence in the Diaspora, their perpetual state of homelessness. Home was that place where they sought refuge from persecution and discrimination. However, the Jews are not and have not been alone in"

"As a child I would always be asked whether I was Jewish or Chilean and, thus, my identity became always conflicted, always a matter of either/or and seldom both. ("Jewish Women in Latin America")"

"Only while in nature's perfection—where there is no difference between the outside world and myself and, at the same time, my own indifference—have I truly felt that I belonged."

"I want literature to be a means for creating humility. (Introduction)"

""Yes, I am a refugee. And it is a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. I am an exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love." (p454)"

"children are a universal treasure...I believe that the best way to determine if a country is defending its human rights is to see how the children of that country live. (Introduction)"