Quotes from Oscar Hijuelos

I enjoy listening to contemporary rock on the college stations while I'm taking long walks, love gospel and soul music, am fascinated by hip-hop and rap as the new kind of urban 'beat' poetry and, come to think of it, find something interesting about just any kind of music.

Oh yes!...The sweet summons of God to man. That's when He calls you up to His arms. And it's the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I'm in no rush to find out.

Latins are predisposed to thinking about the past. Catholicism has a lot to do with it because Catholicism is a contemplation of the past, of symbols that are supposed to be eternally present.

I have never - I have never let go of my childhood contacts. My best friends from childhood are still my best friends.

Music infuses your spirit with a certain energy that I try to convey in my work.

I like to encourage young talented writers to try and help them get published and so forth, but that's all. That's the best I can do.

If you start believing all that press about you, you're in trouble. I don't even read my reviews.

When you write fiction, you can sort of invent more but also pack it with emotions that are very pertinent to you. Whereas with nonfiction, you have to be as factual as possible but also hopefully - also bring... emotional relevance to the piece.

As a kid I had all kinds of questions about how I fit it with my neighborhood and friends and other Latinos.

Of course, I grew up hearing Latin music but, to be honest, aside from my personal circumstances, like most kids I wanted to rebel against what I considered to be such old fashioned fare.

I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.

It's true that immigrant novels have to do with people going from one country to another, but there isn't a single novel that doesn't travel from one place to another, emotionally or locally.

People in their forties, fifties, and onward enjoy the whole world of books in a different way than the Internet-age kids do.

Nightclubs are the equivalent of a Catholic Church in a poor country. You hear a lot of stuff about churches filled with gold while the people are starving. But what elitists don't get is that for poor people, the church is their own mansion. Nightclubs fill the same function.

When you're writing a novel - at least the way I write is I work from what I would call 'emotional atmosphere,' ambiance to ambiance.

Oh yes!...The sweet summons of God to man. That's when He calls you up to His arms. And it's the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I'm in no rush to find out.

The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity.

Glorious life ending. There must have been a moment when his son had gasped for air, the last time, as Jesus must. But as Jesus had risen, he wanted his son to rise up, organs and spirit and mind intact, and everything to be as it had been not so long ago.

clime, to talk about the Bible. To Clemens's inquiry "What, in your opinion, is the Bible?" my father, with his effortless genius, summarized his feelings about it in a single phrase: "The Bible is a book of allegories made to instruct man in the higher principles that should guide life." "And would you consider it a true

Sober, he would regard his wife with amor—the kind of amor the oldest sisters, Margarita and Isabel, knew took place at the end of the evening, when they were all supposed to be asleep and not listening for bedroom noises, agitated springs, gasping, rocking movements, moans of pleasure, or any other such unparental sounds, drifting down the halls, as if they were wall-less and not a single cicada nor a rushing wind existed in all the world.

expression conveying to her, as male expressions would, the simple wish that he might connect with so pleasing a being, as if she were an angel with the power to remake a man's life, his sense of the past and of himself, as if a woman was something in which a man and his history, his pains, his failings, could reside.

bohemian proclivities