Quotes from Luis Alberto Urrea

It became really important to me if I was going to write 'Hummingbird's Daughter' to try to do honor to women.

The stupidity of militarized fences between two worlds is a metaphor for all the things that divide us as human beings.

I used to work with a relief group that took care of the people in the dump. We took them food and water and medicine and built homes and took them to church services, whatever was needed.

I used to approach writing like a football game. If I went out there and aggressively saw more, I'd know more, and I'd capture more, and I'd write better. Hut, hut, hut: First down and haiku!

In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.

Borders are liminal spaces. Anyone worthy of the title of 'writer' is a border writer. We all are border people.

I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.

The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

I'm a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma.

I've been told not to tour down in Mexico. I am too well-known now. The kidnappers may think that my publisher will pay a ransom.

Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn't it? The expectations of it were hard on me.

The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles.

We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny.

Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives.

Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one.

When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy.

It's the most absurd story. I grew up in the dirt streets of Tijuana, dying of all kinds of diseases - tuberculosis, fevers, all that - and it somehow turned into this charmed life. I don't know exactly how.

Many of us writers tour like a literary Bachman Turner Overdrive. We ain't pretty, but we're on the road. Many of us wish we were rock stars anyway. For my part, I live in my iPod. The musicians there are my constant companions on the road.

Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep.

The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could.

I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery.

A lot of our family was undocumented. My mom and dad were both super conservative. My dad had a green card; my mom was an Eisenhower Republican who did not approve of all the 'illegal people.'

I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them.

We're all funny. Humor unites us.