Miguel Syjuco Quotes

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas ... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation.

morality... comes at a price.

You can't bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I'm hardly speaking in metaphor. It's the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?

Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.

I studied in New York. I fell in love with an Australian-born, half-Filipina girl. So we moved to Australia when she went to her university and I moved with her. We moved to Montreal because she was going to take her year abroad, and I wanted to see if I could keep on writing there. It's really hard to make it as a writer in the Philippines.

Love isn't based on gratitude. Respect isn't based on debt.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

A father must take credit for his child, but never a child for his father.

To be angry implies you care

Oh, how wonderfully romantic of you. Romantics are really only in love with themselves.

History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.

How did we become so prejudiced by our idiosyncrasies? ... We shared the same languages, but spoke of worlds so subtly different that language was not enough. Over time the big things were left unsaid; they gave way to the little things, those once-endearing imperfections that had somewhere become deal breakers.

I don't believe in nationalism. I think it's a bunch of slogans. It's a bunch of poor attempts at creating pride. My problem with nationalism is that it becomes exclusionary. We start to exclude people.

You were so beautiful when you were young. So much idealism it was inspiring.

Being remembered is all anyone can ask from a lost love.

The Philippines, it has a politics of patronage. Family and favors, in addition to the old cliche of guns, goons and gold, really do still hold a lot of sway.

'Illustrado' is not an autobiography. Only the ideas are autobiographical; the ideas of bitterness, frustration, unchanging society, an individual lost, social awkwardness ... The book satirises archetypes from across Filipino society, and I felt that the least I could do was offer myself up, too.

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.

Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it

I have to believe that literature can effect change; otherwise, I would have no purpose in my life and would have wasted four years on 'Ilustrado.'

We liked to believe there is an alternate world, a better world, populated entirely by characters created by the yearnings of humanity
governing and inspiring themselves with all the lucidity wit which we rendered them.

I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.

Love and honesty don't mix.

When you're unhappy with your life, you become more selfish with it.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

Literature is an ethical leap. It is a moral decision. A perilous exercise in constant failure. Literature should have grievances, because there are so many grievances in the world.

How could a feeling that leaves you so hollow be a pain that is so sharp?

The little things, you know, eventually become everything.

He fidgets. Thinks. Observes his fellow passengers. Judges everyone, in the traditional Filipino sport of justifying both personal and shared insecurities.

There are only three truths. That which can be known. That which can never be known. The third, which concerns the writer alone, truly is neither of these.

I used to believe authenticity could be achieved solely by describing, in our own words, one's own fragment of experience. This was of course predicated on the complete intellectual and aesthetic independence of the "I". One eventually realizes such intellectual isolationism promotes style, ego, awards. But not change.

There is that potential of the expats coming back to the Philippines. But sadly they are no opportunities, no incentive for them to come back home. Successive governments have, in fact, been training them to export them rather than working on the economy to welcome them home.

My absence was gradual, until one day it was complete.

As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family

Fiction, however, sometimes ensures disappointment with reality

I once thought that The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I'm not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what's in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you'll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don't get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole.

Let me welcome you to my first country, my Third World.

We referenced fictional characters as if they were people to learn from. As if real-life people were too nebulous, too private and unreal for us to understand.

I surprise myself that I'm not dead in the gutter somewhere, surprised that I haven't given up.

The slaves of today will become the tyrants of tomorrow
the proletariat overthrows the hegemon to become the hegemon itself, only to be eventually overthrown by a proto-hegemon that will in turn lose its position. It is this dizzying cycle that keeps humanity chasing the tail it lost millennia ago

When you live in the Philippines or a country like that, you develop something of a very thick skin because you're confronted every day with all of the problems all around you.

All of humanity's crimes,' Salvador said ... 'are only degrees of theft.

How do such flaws become beautiful in the right person?

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

I'm making this confession without hope for absolution.
One morning, I pretended to go crazy. Perhaps in pretending, I proved myself so.

Vilification, by its definition, creates an antagonistic struggle, an us-versus-them mentality, that throws us all into a senseless battle-royale

Children sometimes know best and we chide them for being precocious. Then we grow aged and become again like children, and they call us wise.

Because falling, if you live in the moment,is really just flying, at least until you read the ground

I transform fiction into memory.

How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions

I'm home and safe and filled with the comfort of being somewhere I've already been. The ruckus of homecoming is brutally enjoyable and everyone makes me feel like a champion. And all I had to do was stay away long enough.

The immigrant experience in 'Ilustrado' was only a small part of what I intended to be a broader look at the Filipino experience, even if that broader look was itself merely a specific perspective.

Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get.

I don't see myself as any different from all the other Filipinos who have gone abroad looking for opportunity, to be a nurse, a labourer, a maid or a prostitute.

I've learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn't be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus.

I read a blog about this young filmmaker in the Philippines who made a short film, and one of the characters in the film reads my novel and then starts discussing the novel with someone. The idea that my book can inspire another artist and be part of that other artist's work ... that's the reason I write.

I have no illusions that my work can rouse the masses to create change, because literature simply doesn't have that power anymore in my country, if it does anywhere. But I do hope that it can be read by those who are in positions to create change, or that it can at least be part of that dialogue.