Latest Julia Alvarez Quotes from Interviews

• The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

  Julia Alvarez

  Reading, Writing, Compassion

  Source: ncac.org

• Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

  Julia Alvarez

  School, Character, Issues

  Source: ncac.org

• Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

  Julia Alvarez

  Book, Reading, Difficult Situations

  Source: ncac.org

• I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.

  Julia Alvarez

  Running, Difficult Situations, Silence

  Source: ncac.org

• Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

  Julia Alvarez

  Reading, Thinking, Addresses

  Source: ncac.org

• I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.

  Julia Alvarez

  Thinking, People, Important

  Source: ncac.org

• When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.

  Julia Alvarez

  Brother, Character, Tragic

  Source: ncac.org

• Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

  Julia Alvarez

  Literature, Contradictory, Humans

  Source: ncac.org

• Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

  Julia Alvarez

  Writing, Literature, Aliens

  Source: ncac.org

• It's always gratifying to hear from a passionate reader, and as a longtime educator, I'm especially pleased and heartened when that reader is a young student who is inspired to write me and let me know that my book has helped him or her find her way.

  Julia Alvarez

  Book, Writing, Passionate

  Source: ncac.org

• Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

  Julia Alvarez

  Book, Imagination, Passionate

  Source: ncac.org