Carolina Quotes

Oscar Hijuelos

North Carolina · connected1951–2013

American novelist (1951–2013)

  • Worked at Duke University

novelist, writer

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Quotations with a citation

My advice to me back then is: Beware of people bearing gifts. When you have la fama [fame], people come out of the woodwork who are supposedly looking out after you. There's an old blues song that goes, "She's got a mouth full of gimme and a hand full of much obliged," and basically that's it. Unless you have guidance, it's a hard world to experience, but it has its perks.
On the advice that he’d give to his younger self following the success of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in “Mambo in Double Time: The Beat Goes On” in AARP Magazine (Summer 2010)
My take on Cuba is partly memory-bound, partly melancholic. I read this interesting thing about the word "nostalgia," which is often used about my writing: that it comes from a term ship doctors used to describe a disease when sailors had been out to sea for a few years and were getting homesick. I've always had that, in terms of writing, this thing that is physical,that makes you homesick. For me it is a home that I never really knew and have always seen partly through literature and the great Cuban writers. My writing about Cuba [is] more like an act of creation. Whatever my Cuba is about, it's my own version. I'm not a cultural anthropologist.
On how he writes about Cuban themes in “Mambo in Double Time: The Beat Goes On” in AARP Magazine (Summer 2010)
“My father was – well he had a work ethic and a half. Contrary to popular stereotypes, most Latinos I knew growing up had very strong work ethics. He was also a very kindly man, and…gentle, very soft-spoken. And I think to a certain extent, very shy. And I think I inherited that from him, which has made the fact that I have to get out every now and then, and actually be somebody in front of people without getting terrible stage fright, which I used to get all the time. You know it took me a long time to get over that hump.
On the portions devoted to his father in Thoughts without Cigarettes: A Memoir in “Interview with Pulitzer-prize winning author Oscar Hijuelos on his new memoir, ‘Thoughts Without Cigarettes’” in The Washington Post (2011 Jun 6)

In the libraries

Open Library Empress of the splendid season · 1999 View library record ↗ Open Library Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien · 2014 View library record ↗ Open Library Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The tie-in · 1989 View library record ↗ Open Library Our House In the Last World · 1983 View library record ↗ Open Library The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien · 1993 View library record ↗ Open Library Twain & Stanley enter paradise · 2015 View library record ↗

Read Oscar Hijuelos

Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The tie-in 1989 Find a copy Our House In the Last World 1983 Find a copy The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien 1993 Find a copy Twain & Stanley enter paradise 2015 Find a copy Empress of the splendid season 1999 Find a copy Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien 2014 Find a copy