“I'm not a Mexican writer, but I think everything that happens in Mexico affects the Mexican writers I know, in their sense of being human and of being Mexican, even if they don't in any explicit way address these issues in their writing.” ThinkingWritingBeing HumanMexicanBeing MeExplicit Author:Francisco Goldman
“I'm a little skeptical of so-called narco fiction, I have to say, though some writers I admire may have written some narco fiction. You feel the dread and the atmosphere in Yuri Herrera's extraordinary novels, but you'd never say that what he writes is narco fiction. The same goes for Martin Solares's novels, inspired by the nightmare city of Tampico, where he's from. Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, I know that they're deeply affected by what goes on in Mexico, but their wonderful writing points in another direction, though not necessarily always and only.” WritingNovelWonderfulExtraordinaryInspiredAdmireAtmosphereNightmareDreadSkeptical Author:Francisco Goldman
“I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.” WritingTryingPossibility Author:Francisco Goldman
“The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suffering and trauma that so many in Mexico and Central America endure, and that is all around us whether we notice it or not.” WritingSufferingInterestPoliceVictimEndureTraumaSurvivor Author:Francisco Goldman
“I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!” PeopleThinkingGivingWritingPoliticalResponsibilityNovelAmbitionDebateImmigration Author:Francisco Goldman
“I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.” ThinkingWritingTryingTogetherEnergyNovelCreativeTension Author:Francisco Goldman
