Quotes from F. Sionil Jose

We must know our own roles. We should also know the roles that others play, and the rules such roles follow. In this manner, social harmony is maintained. It is when we overstep our roles, or act without knowing them, that social anarchy ensues.

It was in the sugar hacienda in Negros, Panay and in Central Luzon where I saw the injustices heaped upon the sugar workers, particularly the sacadas, or seasonal workers.

...the mind can also be kind and does blot out those episodes of our existence that we can't erase in our consciousness.

Time will come that all that we love, we will eventually lose, and all that we hate we will eventually face.

Japan is very cosmopolitan - it values its origins, but a world view hovers above this narrow perspective. The interest of the Japanese in their folk culture is transcendental.

I envy those Hindus and Buddhists who have in their religion philosophy and ancestor worship which build in the believer a continuity with the past, and that most important ingredient in the building of a nation - memory.

Christianity doesn't demand that we worship our ancestors. If we don't remember our ancestors, then, in all likelihood, we cannot also recall the distant past.

Always remember: the alleviation of poverty is never a political or economic issue - it is moral.

This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

I have always admired teachers because teaching, like the priesthood, medicine and writing, is a vocation. You don't become a teacher because you want wealth. It is the same with writing.

Tourists as well as natives want to see cultural achievements - whether it's the Banaue Terraces, the old churches or museums.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.

You can't have integrity for breakfast, but try and keep it because it is perhaps the single most important word that defines not just writers but all human beings.

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

Sometimes we have to lie so that we do not needlessly hurt others. The important thing is that we are honest with ourselves. That we know how to bend without breaking ourselves. -Crepusculo Lepidoptera

We read because they teach us about people, we can see ourselves in them,in their problems.And by seeing ourselves in them, we clarify ourselves, we explain ourselves to ourselves, so we can live with ourselves...

Just because you have so much to give does not mean that they'll all be accepted. There's more to giving than just giving.

You will find that our enemies are our own kin. It is they who betray us. So learn this most important lesson-in the end, our worst enemy is ourselves

Perhaps, this is what love has always been, whether it is for a woman of for a cause -- the readiness to give and not ask for anything in return, the unquestioning willingness to lose everything, even if that loss is as something as precious as life itself.