Quotes About Author

These notes would one day form the foundation of a global UFO movement called "Rama," based on many books written by both Charlie and his brother Sixto about their experience.

The Secret History of Extraterrestrials: Advanced Technology and the Coming New Race by Len Kasten.

I must confess to generally hating sections entitled "how to read this book" and so on. I feel that, if I bought it, I should be able to read it any way I damn well please! Nevertheless, I feel some guidelines may be useful.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.

insight," and the "message" of his books (which is no message at all) is similar to Gogol's in Nabokov's summary: "Something is very wrong and all men are mild lunatics engaged in petty pursuits that seem to them very important, while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." By reputation Portis is reclusive, yet

What about writers—are they protesting?" "Yes, many," María said. "Juan Villoro?" "Villoro has written a great deal, and he is a friend to our movement.

Don't write," he said, seeing me scribbling into my notebook, taking me for a journalist.

if I promised to put my notebook on the floor and my pen in my pocket. And he suggested that I sit back and not gape out the window.

Related to fertility, the bat was known in Zapotec as bigidiri zinnia—flesh butterfly (mariposa de carne)—and was a benign god.

I mentioned that I had just come from a tour in Boys' Town. "That's very risky," Jaime Arispe said. "You have no rights there, because it's a Zona de Tolerancia. They have their own police.

Instead of accepting that, I am writing this. I realize that what motivates most other writers in the world is the desire to have control over their obituary.

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient

The Peace Corps was innocent and inefficient, and we weren't under any pressure to join.

His Congo Diary is a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa

The insecurity in Juárez drifted through the air like the memory of a shattering dream.

a powerful account of an idealistic man's campaign to bring change to Africa, at a time when I was a schoolteacher in the African bush.

the gringos of McAllen stayed at home

which proved yet again, as I had seen in many lands, that the Bible was often the happy hunting ground of an unbalanced mind.

Greene was insecure, needy, insatiable, interested in variation, and always willing to have a go.

The travel, the sex, the writing, the romances, were—so Norman Sherry suggests—all attempts by Greene to relieve his depression. He was an authentic melancholic.

All that light, instead of giving an impression of warmth and activity, merely exposed its emptiness in a deadening blaze.

This mention of Juan Villoro was fortuitous. He is one of Mexico's most illustrious writers, a

an intruder wearing a Mexican alibi.