Robert Swindells Quotes

“I guess sometimes there are moments when people’s lives change and they don’t even know it. They can look back later, when everything's different, and say yes, that was the start of it―that’s when it all began, and I didn't even notice.”

“I guess sometimes there are moments when people’s lives change and they don’t even know it. They can look back later, when everything's different, and say yes, that was the start of it―that’s when it all began, and I didn't even notice.”

“Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.”

“I just read this great quote by Junot Diaz, he was talking about true intimacy, and he was saying that it was the willingness to be vulnerable and to be found out. That’s what I felt that YA did. It wasn't pretentious, and it wasn’t hiding its heart. It wanted to be found out...It felt like those moments when you go to a party and you're standing around for a long time, going, I don't fit in here, what am I going to talk to these people about? And everybody's getting drunk, and then you find this one person, and you end up sitting in some corner talking about all these arcane things.And then before you know it you're having a conversation about the meaning of life and it's four o’clock in the morning. That kind of feeling, that kind of intimacy — I felt like that's what I got from YA.”

“Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.”

“Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.”

“Personally I always feel like I could use a little more of poetry apothegmatic power in my own work but we're always lacking something.”

“'A Princess of Mars' may not have exerted the same colossal pull that Tarzan had on the global imagination, but its influence on generations of readers cannot be underestimated.”

“I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.”

“When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.”

“I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films.”