Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies? 'Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.

Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies?

I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone —adults promising us their own failed future.

I was eleven, the idea of two identical digits in my age still new and spectacular and heartbreaking. The girls must have felt this. They must have known. Where had ten, nine, eight, and seven gone?

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey, fraught at times with characters who don't always do or say what a writer wishes.

I knew I was lost inside the world, watching it and trying to understand why too often I felt like I was standing just beyond the frame—of everything.

Because Filipinos are very creative and assiduous people, they will always find a way to make things happen.

A human teenager. One of God’s most misbegotten creatures – big like grown-ups and yet dumb like children.

It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. But I am sure that figures show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.

Will you punish me forever?

I learned from Francis Ford Coppola to treat the company like your family.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture.

Daniel, my big brother, is eight years older. I'm lucky he didn't mind hanging out with his little sister and my younger brother.

The man the state has put in place must have obedient hearing to his least command when it is right, and even when it's not.

I'm not thuggin' for me, I'm thuggin' for my family, I pay all the bills, I feed my whole family, wrong or right, I do and I can't stop.