“You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?”

“Angst is not the human condition, it’s the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can’t get.”

“I transform fiction into memory.”

“A man's life is all he has. When you're old, it's all you'll ever have.”

“And yet,from the air you think her peaceful and unflustered. On the ground is a place tangled with good intentions and a tyrannical will to live.”

“Maybe maturity is merely accepting the tally of all the disappearing options of life.”

“Freedom is the only thing we must demand in life, for all other good things stem from it”