No one is born a writer; literacy is a peculiar mode of being, but I was all about stories from a very early age, before reading.
Books are solitudes in which we meet.
Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.
Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them.
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.
A contrarian at heart, I am often guided by what I disagree with and don’t want.
I’ve been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.
I think that fear of the mob, the expectation that people, particularly poor and nonwhite people become mobs almost automatically in the absence of coercive authority, is inculcated by the media, the movies, and politicians.
I was not going to surrender to the status quo and corporate insistence that ordinary people have no power and influence.
I roam around a lot in my territory, but what I learn at one end inflects and opens up my understanding at the other.
I’m a big fan of the vigor of civil society, political engagement, and public life in many parts of Latin America.
For me the insurrectionary possibilities of disaster are what make them really interesting and sometimes positive – Mexico City’s big 1985 earthquake brought a lot of positive, populist, anti-institutional social change.
There are disasters that are entirely manmade, but none that are entirely natural.
We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.
For me, before I learned how to read I was really interested in story and in landscape and nature. I decided to become a writer almost as soon as I learned to read.
I don’t think my work has to be loved by everyone, and it’s loved by enough people that I’m grateful and able to keep going.
I think that walking down the middle of the street with several thousand people who share your deepest beliefs is one of the best ways to take a walk.
You don’t have to be a preacher to talk about what matters, and you don’t have to drop the pleasures of style.
A lot of people think of political activism as some grim duty, and I think we do have an obligation to be citizens – to be informed and engaged.