Quotes from Rigoberto González

Funerals in México are also about drowning sorrow with liquor. The coffee is spiked with tequila

My four years of high school were spent locked up inside "el campo." I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.

Unlike my dead lover, I refuse to/ choose the day I shock the world. There's no/ mystery left in suicide. The challenge is, my love,/ to keep yourself awake/ despite the sleeping pill doses of sickness and/ despair.

What's a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.

One of the things I'm constantly telling my students is that they're never going to write a poem everyone gets, or if they do, they've failed. They should leave someone behind every time.

I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home.

I tend to overuse the word "project" only because "book" is terrifying while I'm still in the middle of something. A project can fail. I don't want a book to fail.

I pay editors. I never ask friends or colleagues to work for free.

Publishers have in-house editors, but I hire my own before I submit the work to publishers. They appreciate it and I feel more confident about the material.

Human suffering is articulated in language; communication is how we seek help, consolation, etc.