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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?