Achy Obejas famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.
-- Achy Obejas

#Pride #Joy #Crowns
I tell people to have a relationship with their work every day, even if it means you just move a comma.
-- Achy Obejas

#Moving #Mean #People
I've gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I've become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There's no closer reading then when you read to translate.
-- Achy Obejas

#Reading #Trying #Different
In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.
-- Achy Obejas

#Literature #Journalism #Deadline
Both childbirth and abortion are medical procedures but neither is an illness, and sometimes they're both treated as such.
-- Achy Obejas

#Abortion #Medical #Sometimes
Journalism is very much public writing, writing with an audience in mind, writing for publication, and frequently writing quickly. And I know that when I worked daily journalism it really affected my patience with literature, which I think requires reflection, and a different kind of engagement.
-- Achy Obejas

#Writing #Reflection #Thinking
Each genre has its own process. I'm very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned. Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.
-- Achy Obejas

#Lying #Writing #Journalism
This is going to sound nuts but it took me forever to figure out why I'd stopped writing poetry - I mean, I went about a decade where I wrote very little poetry and I thought it was because I was doing a weekly blog. And then when we moved, I reconfigured my writing desk. The previous one had had very little space to write by hand. And suddenly, the poetry was gushing!
-- Achy Obejas

#Writing #Mean #Forever
So much depends on our health, and we tend to take it so for granted.
-- Achy Obejas

#Granted
I'm never afraid of research. I relish it!
-- Achy Obejas
Interestingly, in Cuba abortion is treated as lightly as getting a mole removed.
-- Achy Obejas

#Abortion
Our real world has evolved. It's become something much different, and inadvertently about healthcare, and about what it means to have good health, and to be able to have good health.
-- Achy Obejas

#Real #Mean #Different
The legacy of the embargo will be Cuba's poverty and desperation. When the island comes out of it, they'll be even more desperate than they are now about the things they think they've missed. I think one of the unintended results of the embargo is that Cuba is quite consumerist - and I'm talking about the people, not the government or the official propaganda.
-- Achy Obejas

#Thinking #People #Legacy
I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.
-- Achy Obejas

#Writing #Possessive #Translate
We're a long way from the embargo ending. Look at what just happened with the rollback of Obama's Cuba policies. Two idiot congressmen convinced our idiot president to make it harder on Cubans on the island.
-- Achy Obejas

#Long #President #Idiot

You may also like:

Alison Bechdel
Cartoonist
Cristina Garcia
Journalist
Dorothy Allison
Writer
Edwidge Danticat
Author
Eugene Jarvis
Video Game Designer
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Novelist
Gustavo Perez Firmat
Junot Diaz
Writer
Kate Bornstein
Author
Maureen Howard
Writer
Nami Mun
Novelist
Norman Finkelstein
Political Scientist
Rigoberto Gonzalez
Writer
Ruth Behar
Anthropologist
S. Bear Bergman
Author
Sarah Schulman
Novelist
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
Correspondent
Mariela Castro
Activist