Novelists From The Philippines

"I'm not a writer who works off an outline. I don't do file cards. Some writers know where they're going when they sit down to write a novel. I know there are certain things I want to include, but I'm character driven and if the characters keep moving and living and growing on me, the story unfolds. It's like a puzzle which starts falling into place. But I never know where I'm going when I start."

"If I were to write with that agenda in mind, then I'd destroy the writing. No, I write really because I have to and if the writing also destroys some of those myths and subverts forms and makes people question the very idea of the writer, the woman, the Filipino American, the whatever, great! (INTERVIEWER: Where does art have to come from to accomplish those kinds of ends? If you set out directly to accomplish them, you probably wouldn't have writing that is, in your opinion, worth reading? So, where does it have to come from?) JH: It has to come from the deepest, deepest, deepest insides of your soul. And it's got to be brutally honest. It's like pornography. You know it when you are doing it and you know when you're bullshitting. You know when you're being self-conscious and contrived and forcing something to be there because you want to make sure that people get the point. You know when that's happening. But if you just really listen to yourself and to your characters, you don't go for the easy stuff."

"A lot of novels about the Philippines or set in the Philippines don't cut it at all because they don't capture the crazy quilt atmosphere and the hybrid ambiance that occurs twenty-four hours a day. Things happening all the time, and noise and crowds and beautiful animals and amazing flora. At the same time, pollution and urbanization and sophistication and, you know, the jungle. How do you do all that? You can't tell it in a traditional way because the language dies. And also the music of the language itself, the music of the streets. How do convey that chaos? So, once I decided to go with it as I found it, I relaxed because at the risk of alienating some readers, this was the way the novel had to be presented."

"I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice their humor, their fatalism, their... well, that overused term "magical realism." It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much we don't know what it means anymore. But the way they can use language and visions and surrealism without being corny, and the humor that's always there, is very close to a Filipino sensibility. More so than-now this is a completely personal perception-other writers from Southeast Asia."

"What made me want to write a novel was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez. I was turned on to that by a friend from Mexico who gave me the book. It was like Holy Communion or something. I said, "Yes!" Here is a novel that reads so lyrically and so poetically, and yet is a novel. It's a wonderful story. You want to know what happens to these people. And at the same time I saw the connection for me. It was like the Philippines was something I was carrying around and I didn't know what art form it would take to convey the story I wanted to tell, and I read that book and said, "That's it. One day I'm gonna do it.""

"We are poor because our elites from way back had no sense of nation."

":Quoted by Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, 2010, p. 89"

":Source: REVOLUTION AND THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 2004, Vol. 168, No. 1"

"The American decision to make Rizal our national hero was a master stroke."

"Although the Americans encouraged the hero-worship of Rizal, the man was already a national hero to the Filipinos long before the Americans sponsored him as such."

"There is no doubt that we would have made Rizal one of our heroes even without American intervention."

"Rizal's greatest misfortune was becoming a national hero of the Philippines. He is everywhere and therefore nowhere."

"The first Filipino."

"To echo the first Filipino, you get the Rizal you deserve. (alluding to Rizal's statement, 'You get the government you deserve')"

"Consummatum est( it is finished)"

"Rizal is the spirit of contradiction; a soul that dreads the revolution, although deep down desires it."

"A gem of a man. (Un perla de hombre.)"

"His coming to the world is like the appearance of a rare comet, whose brilliance appears only every other century."

"The life Rizal lived is a more abiding gift than the things he said and wrote. His life will forever be of inestimable importance."

"Sleep in the shadows of nothingness Redeemer of an enslaved land — Don't weep in the mystery of the tomb Nor grieve the momentary triumph of the Spaniard; For if the bullet ravaged your skull Your idea vanquished an empire!"

"One of the best exemplars of nationalist thinking."

"In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it."

"To doubt God is to doubt one's own conscience, and in consequence it would be to doubt everything."

"No, let us not make God in our image, poor inhabitants that we are of a distant planet lost in infinite space. However brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light."

"I believe in revelation, but not in revelation which each religion claims to possess... but in the living revelation which surrounds us on every side — mighty, eternal, unceasing, incorruptible, clear, distinct, universal as is the being from whom it proceeds, in that revelation which speaks to us and penetrates us from the moment we are born until we die."

"Each one writes history according to his convenience."

"Today is Christmas Eve. Whether or not Christ was born exactly on this date is not important. But chronological accuracy has nothing to do with tonight's event. A grand genius had been born who preached truth and love; who suffered because of his mission; and on account of his sufferings the world has become better, if not saved. Only it gives me nausea to see how some people abuse his name to commit numerous crimes. If he is in heaven, he will certainly protest!"

"Is it not sad, I said to my countrymen, that we have to learn from a foreigner about ourselves? Thanks to the German scholars we get accurate information about ourselves, and when everything in our country has been destroyed and we wish to verify the historical correctness of certain facts we shall have to come to Germany to search for these facts, in German museums and books!"

"The Philippines should be grateful to you if you would write a complete history of our country from an impartial point of view.. But don't expect thanks and laurels--crowns of flowers and laurels are the inventions of free people. But perhaps your children may gather the fruit of what the father planted."

"We want the happiness of the Philippines, but we want to obtain it through noble and just means. If I have to commit villainy to make her happy, I would refuse to do so, because I am sure that what is built on sand sooner or later would tumble down."

"One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present itself again."

"To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own."

"...Does your Excellency know the spirit of (my) country? If you did, you would not say that I am "a spirit twisted by a German education," for the spirit that animates me I already had since childhood, before I learned a word of German. My spirit is "twisted" because I have been reared among injustices and abuses which I saw everywhere, because since a child I have seen many suffer stupidly and because I also have suffered. My "twisted spirit" is the product of that constant vision of the moral ideal that succumbs before the powerful reality of abuses, arbitrariness, hypocrisies, farces, violence, perfidies and other base passions. And "twisted" like my spirit is that of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have not yet left their miserable homes, who speak no other language except their own, and who, if they could write or express their thoughts, would make my Noli me tangere very tiny indeed, and with their volumes there would be enough to build pyramids for the corpses of all the tyrants..."

"Genius has no country. It blossoms everywhere. Genius is like the light, the air. It is the heritage of all."

"It was a world which granted privileges to some and imposed prohibitions on others...Endowed with strength and eager to learn, one had to drag himself in a narrow prison cell when he could see an open field, a vast horizon in the distance; when he could feel the beatings of a heart; and when he believed himself entitled to enjoy the beauty of a dream."

"Friar! What a strange name. I don't remember having created such a thing! (God speaking to the angel Gabriel)"

"Filipinos don't realize that victory is the child of struggle, that joy blossoms from suffering, and redemption is a product of sacrifice."

"Death has always been the first sign of European civilization when introduced in the Pacific."

"No one has a monopoly of the true God, nor is there a nation or religion that can claim, or at any rate prove, that it has been given the exclusive right to the Creator or sole knowledge of His Being."

"The sea, the sea is everything! Its sovereign mass brings to me atoms of a myriad faraway lands; Its bright smile animates me in the limpid mornings And when at the end of day my faith has failed me My heart echoes the sound of its sorrow in the sands."

"The world laughs at another man's pain."

"He who would love much has also much to suffer."

"Muse who in the past inspired me to sing of the throes of love: Go and repose. What I need is a sword, rivers of gold, and acrid prose."

"No good water comes from a muddy spring. No sweet fruit comes from a bitter seed."

"The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others."

"Man works for an object. Remove that object and you reduce him into inaction."

"Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks."

"Virtue lies in the middle ground."

"God has made man a cosmopolite. He created seas for ships to glide on, the wind to push them, and the stars to guide them even in darkest night."

"Travel is a caprice in childhood, a passion in youth, a necessity in manhood, and an elegy in old age."