We can live with lots of things, but we can't live without imagination, we can't live without hope.
You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.
I think to be in exile is a curse, and you need to turn it into a blessing. Youve been thrown into exile to die, really, to silence you so that your voice cannot come home. And so my whole life has been dedicated to saying, I will not be silenced.
You can survive with anger, but you can't live with it forever.
There's a tendency, especially among revolutionaries, to only show the good side of yourself and then when you come to power, the bad side comes out.
We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.
Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.
Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you some grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person's body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination.
Torture presupposes, it requires, it craves the abrogation of our capacity to imagine others suffering, dehumanizing them so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer, placing the victim outside and beyond any form of compassion or empathy, but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.
Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.
Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and the perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?
Most writers who leave their country physically have already left it mentally and emotionally.
Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages.
I don't believe in God, but I believe in angels.
Mining created Chile. The story of men who go down into the mountain and chip away at minerals in the darkness and then suffer an accident that leaves them at the mercy of that darkness is part of the DNA of Chile, an integral part of the country's history.
I feel as if I can take Indian stories, make them mine and take them to the world.
I'm a mongrel in the sense that I'm Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south - all these things are mixed in me.
This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.
I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds.
