F. Sionil Jose Quotes

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

My music is about my life. If it's something that I've lived, then it's something that I've written about.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.

All the movies that I make in some ways have to be the story of my life. There are different chapters in my life.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

It's much more important to write than to be written about.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

Whenever I write, I only write about what I know or what I have experienced or feeling.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.