It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can’t talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?
BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZI got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.
More Benjamin Alire Saenz Quotes
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I bring my best instincts to my work. For instance – and I come by this naturally, or I think I do – I am a very good judge of character.
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The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.
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I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn’t get–and never would get.
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Mostly, I think people are fake. Well, what do you expect? The fake world we live in conspires to make us all fakes.
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Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.
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I think writing books is a way for me to work out certain issues. I write about what matters to me, always.
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I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
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The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
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Absent parents aren’t abusive per se. They’re neglectful. They love in a very imperfect way. There are parents like that, and they do love their daughters and sons, but they’re not parents in the way that we might think of it.
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Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
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You are thirst and thirst is all I know
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I don’t want to just discuss the issues – I want family to be a real part of the character of the novels I write, and I don’t like to write things that feel like issue books.
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It’s a complex thing when you’re writing a novel, because so much of it is conscious and planned and deliberate, and so much of it is not, and it has to be a dance between the conscious and the unconscious.
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I do that with all of my characters. They have one of the flaws I have, and I zero in on that flaw.
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Words were different when they lived inside of you.
BENJAMIN ALIRE SAENZ