Carolina QuotesMy 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.
Oscar Hijuelos Connected to the Carolinas
Source
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)
- year
- 2010
Cite this record
“My advice to me back then is: Beware of people bearing gifts…” Oscar Hijuelos. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-2268EFA6E2. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/2268efa6e2
More from Oscar Hijuelos
“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.
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.