Oscar Hijuelos Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A great novel is worth one thousand films.

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.

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

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.

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.

On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life. Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky about the rooftops. A sky shimmery with the possibilities of the death; lights exaggerated, the heavens peeled back- a swirling haze of nebulae and comets - in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey

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.