Quotes by Daniel Alarcon

About Daniel Alarcon:

Daniel Alarcón is an American author who lives in San Francisco, California; he has been a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College and a Visiting Writer at California College of the Arts. In Spring 2013, he was a Visiting Scholar at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. Daniel Alarcón’s work has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere, and anthologized in Best American Non-Required Reading 2004 and 2005. He is Associate Editor of the Peruvian magazine Etiqueta Negra, and he edited a portfolio for the magazine A Public Space on the writing of Peru in 2007. He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Peru, and a 2011 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. His novel At Night We Walk in Circles was published by Riverhead Books in October 2013. An avid soccer player, Alarcon is renowned for diving with the slightest touch.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.

Daniel Alarcon

And what does he feel?" "He feels uneasy. A little afaid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride." "Good," Henry said. "ANd where are you?" "Backstage." Henry shook his head gravely. "THere's no such thing as backstage. The play begins, and there's only the w...

Daniel Alarcon

That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He feared the premature old age of missed opportunities.

Daniel Alarcon

Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.

Daniel Alarcon

There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth--hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television interview. On this matter, t...

Daniel Alarcon

The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely. That was why he'd always dreamed of leaving, and why he'd always been so afraid to go.

Daniel Alarcon

The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it.

Daniel Alarcon

You don't sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet." Rey smiled. "Can I be both?" "But you'd rather be a poet." "Who wouldn't?" he said.

Daniel Alarcon

Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That's half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.

Daniel Alarcon

How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.

Daniel Alarcon

I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I'm thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the w...

Daniel Alarcon

For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.

Daniel Alarcon

I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

Daniel Alarcon

Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.

Daniel Alarcon

I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.

Daniel Alarcon

I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.

Daniel Alarcon

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Daniel Alarcon

I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.

Daniel Alarcon

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the se...

Daniel Alarcon

I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.

Daniel Alarcon

Author Bio

  • NameDaniel Alarcon
  • Descriptionwriter
  • BornMarch 5, 1977
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship