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

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

Clichés remind and reassure us that we're not alone, that others have trod this ground long ago.

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?

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

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

It kills me how these days everyone has clinical justification for their strangeness.