Miguel Syjuco

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

“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 love my homeland, but it's an absurd country. Politics in the Philippines is like spectator sports!”

“To be angry implies you care”

“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”

“History is changed by martyrs who tell the truth.”

“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.”

“Love and honesty don’t mix.”

“If I were to go back to the Philippines, I would probably end up teaching creative writing at a university. I wouldn't be able to write, for I would become too jaded to be able to view the existing situation objectively.”

“What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don't have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.”

“Angry men have little to live for when their rage becomes ineffective.”

“I transform fiction into memory.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“...when you hate someone so much, a part of you wants desperately to forgive them. But you can't decide if it's because you really want, or if you just want to stop hating. I still don't know if forgiveness is generous or selfish. Maybe both.”

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

“Oh, sweetheart. What can anyone do? That's just the way things are. You really think you can change the world?”

“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.”

“I grew up with a very privileged background. My father served as one of the cabinet ministers in Arroyo's government, and he's been a congressman for many years, and he's running again.”

“Every teenager is both a hero and a failure. When we become adults we have to choose where in the middle we’ll be.”