Status Updates From Why We Are Hungry: Rats in ...

I understand how the heart falters, how the sight dims and how age lays siege on all of us, but I will never understand how the dream can die. And so, although I know it won't be, how I wish I could have a lease of another thirty years so I could see how these brave young Filipinos who gladdened would survive- like I did- and prevail, which I didn't.

Fame and popularity are important structures in a hero’s pedestal, but the elements for greatness transcend such qualities for they spring from the total essence of the hero, from his (Ninoy Aquino) very soul.

Any politician who aspires to lead this fractured nation should bear in mind that he must real power base from which to rule and be obeyed.

I repeat- never, never romanticize the poor or glamorize poverty; avoid such cliche traps like, poor but virtuous, honor among the poor- because there is nothing honorable about poverty. It is totally degrading.

The measure of progress then should not reside so much in such objects as soaring skyscrapers, in marble artifacts, but in the humanity of that civilization, in the justice that suffuses it.

A writer’s life is harsh. First there is the very tedious struggle to put down on paper the fires that burn in our bellies, the honking of craft into art, the total immersion into what we are writing, the shutting off the outside world so that we enter the new world of the imagination with clarity and anxiety.

Rizal chose literature because literature would live long after the event, literature because it would touch the heart.

For that is what Bertolt Brecht said: “Shouting about injustice hoarsens the voice,” and the artist whose voice is hoarse will not be understood, will not even be listened to.

We need strong opinions, even incendiary biases not just to liven up the cultural scene, but to weed out the impostors in our ranks. We need them to creat a more original, a more creatively imaginative Filipino art. To paraphrase that old Latin injunction, Ubi boni tacent, malum prosperat, mediocrity flourishes where honest critics are silent.

... when a jobless man feeds his two children with recycled garbage and they die, when thousands of our college graduates work abroad as housemaids, or even as prostitutes- all these are injustices that cry to heaven for redress.

Language defines those who use it, their culture.

"Death is the great leveler, and if we only thought more often of this ultimate truth- that we cannot bring anything with us - then perhaps, ours will be a safer and more just society."

"Writers should be judged not only by their writing but also by how they act and live."

"To build a power base in the Army is a leader's imperative. But that leader, like Magsaysay, must set the example of discipline and rectitude to be credible. Then the soldiers will follow. More than this, they will be reunited. Their morale will be high. They themselves will clean their own disheveled and dispirited ranks."