Daniel Alarcon Quotes
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When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
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I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.
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Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.
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How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.
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I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
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Meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that's what I'm most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure.
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I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.
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At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say.
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A lot of attention has been paid in Latin America to the new generation of nonfiction writers, authors like Julio Villanueva Chang, Diego Osorno, Cristóbal Peña, Gabriela Wiener, Leila Guerriero, Cristian Alarcón, among others. These are writers doing important, groundbreaking work. So the talent is there, as is the habit of radio listenership, and what we propose to do is unite the two. We want to have these immensely gifted journalists - men and women who've already revitalized the long-form narrative - we want them to tell their stories in sound.
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It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.
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I guess in my own life I don't really think much about manliness too much. I feel like a lot of men that I know don't sit around thinking, "How am I supposed to be a man?" I don't think that I have to prove anything.
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I have a love/hate relationship with the internet. It's obviously the central tool of how I work, and how I keep in touch with all the writers and then producers that I'm collaborating with. Skype saves my life, you know.
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For fiction, Im not particularly nationalistic. Im not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
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I think probably the thing I'm worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I'm often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can't. I would die. There's no way I could write a column.
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Writing an op-ed feels like I'm taking the SAT. It's so hard. It feels like homework. And if it feels like homework, it just doesn't get done.
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The bond between parent and child is chemical, fierce, and inexplicable, even if that parent is a sworn killer. This connection cannot be measured; it at once more subtle and more powerful than science.
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A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off.
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My first and last love will always be fiction. It's the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
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Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can't afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don't have the habit of reading novels.
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I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
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I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.
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I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
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Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller, whose gifts are displayed on every page of this beautiful, daring, and deeply humane book.
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I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.
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I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.
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I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. Im thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.
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Radio, or at least the kind of radio we're proposing to do, can cut through that. It can reach people who would otherwise never hear your work, and of course I find that very notion inspiring. Radio stories are powerful because the human voice is powerful. It has been and will continue to be the most basic element of storytelling. As a novelist (and I should note that working my novel is the first thing I do in the morning and the very last thing I do before I sleep), shifting into this new medium is entirely logical. It's still narrative, only with different tools.
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What I'm most interested in is not necessarily the wound, but the scar. Not how someone is wounded, but what the scar does later.
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I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.
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The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.
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