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Quotes by Alma Guillermoprieto

A left-wing guerrilla is somebody who belongs to an organization that by now is 30 or 40 years old. There are several guerrilla groups in Colombia, not just one. And they more or less adhere to a Maoist or a traditional Cuban approach to revolution.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
And in fact, I dream in whatever language I'm living in. So that, you know, after six months of being in the States, I started dreaming in English again. And when I moved back to Mexico, after a few months, I started dreaming in Spanish again.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
And, of course, millions of us cross the border to work in US homes and gardens and factories and carpentry shops and restaurants, and if you go to a restaurant pretty much anywhere in the United States, the chances are that the dishes will be washed by a Mexican.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
But we all dream of, you know, the great novel that we will write some day when we have time. And it's probably not happening.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
Hotel rooms, for example, are good places for me to write because they're so free of associations. I have to get myself into my sort of tattyest sweatpants and T-shirt and I do it on a computer now, amazingly enough. I never could use a typewriter because the noise... drove me crazy, but I used to use a notebook. Now I use a computer because it doesn't make that much noise.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I love food and I love everything involved with food. I love the fun of it. I love restaurants. I love cooking, although I don't cook very much. I love kitchens.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I may not have a practical mind, but it's very fixated on concrete things. I like detail.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I read a lot. And both of my parents, I think, would have wanted to be writers. It's funny how one ends up doing the things that-that parents-perhaps, the dreams that parents couldn't fulfill. I know that my mother would have been beyond herself to have had a story published in The New Yorker.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I realized that I had traveled to Havana during what now seems like the childhood of the Cuban Revolution, if you think that Fidel has now been in power for 44 extremely long years. I started looking at the revolution as history, and not as part of the daily news.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I think that one of the things that we can really all feel very happy about is that the human rights situation in Latin America has improved enormously over the last 10 years, enormously, enormously. But the level or horror that some of us had to cover as reporters working in Latin America was pretty hard to describe at points. And it has changed.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I think that the temptation to feel that your entire life has been wasted must be very great for a lot of Cubans.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I think the great Mexican cuisine is dying because there are fast foods now competing, because there are supermarkets, and supermarkets can't afford to keep in stock a lot of these very perishable products that are used for fine Mexican cooking. Women are working and real Mexican cooking requires enormous amounts of time.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I tried to reconstruct just how and why I had stopped dancing years earlier. The turning point for that decision was a six-month sojourn teaching dance in Cuba back in 1970.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I went to school at a school that doesn't exist anymore. It was called the Walden School, so you can guess a lot of things from it by the name, right? We were allowed to smoke in the classroom. We all wore blue jeans and sandals.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
If you're going to be a myth or want to be a myth, you'd better die young.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
Juan Peron, I think in the end, had become a little resentful of Eva. She was so popular. She was so much more loved than he was. And he never wanted to be buried in the same tomb with her. So she was buried in her family crypt; he was buried in his own crypt.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
My great-great-great-I may be missing a great there-grandfather was called Guillermo Prieto, and he was a very popular poet in his day, and a journalist and a member of President Juarez's Cabinet.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
So, you know, I always say that I'm a Mexican, but if I had to be a citizen of anywhere else, I'd be a citizen of Manhattan. I-I feel very much a New Yorker.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
Somebody will come from Village X and then they'll send for the brother and then they'll send for the sister and then they'll send for the brother-in-law and then they'll send for the wife of the brother-in-law. Everybody sharing a very small house or an apartment, working in shifts and sending money back to the family.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again. I'm completely in awe of this skill, since I happen to be both bilingual and a writer, but nevertheless a lousy translator.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
The fact that I am temperamentally so unsuited to understand that country made my time there infinitely more difficult, but I think it made for a better book; any number of people have gone all swoony about Cuba, and I couldn't. But I tried so hard! So I think I learned a lot, in the course of all that effort, and I observed a lot, and it may be that the text has some edge as a result. That's what I hoped for, at any rate.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
The left is being funded primarily by the drug traffickers who provide this tax money and that's why the guerrillas in Colombia, unlike the guerrillas anywhere else in Latin America, have been able to survive for 40 years because they have a hard, solid source of income.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
The most that somebody in Mexico City will get paid for a job in construction is 100 pesos a day.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
There is no point to samba if it doesn't make you smile.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
Translation is a notoriously thankless profession: there is absolutely no money in it; it involves a severe submersion of the self into another; the hours are long and you get about as much recognition for your efforts as the telephone repairman.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
What I wonder is what would happen in California, say, if all the Mexicans left from one day to the next?
– Alma Guillermoprieto
When all hell broke loose in Nicaragua, nobody knew where Nicaragua was, nobody knew how to pronounce that, nobody knew how to spell that. And I happened to speak English, and I happened to know John Retty, who was the editor of Latin American Newsletters, and he said would I go.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
You kno, writers are ruthless. My passionate interest in a given subject, or country, generally extends to about one week after the galleys come out, and then I'm on to something else. My one abiding passion has been for Colombia, for reasons that are completely unclear to me - which is probably just as well. As for Cuba, what can I say? It's tropical, and I'm not.
– Alma Guillermoprieto
You know, one, two, three, four, five years go by and then Marcos gets a little boring.
– Alma Guillermoprieto