I love my homeland, but it's an absurd country. Politics in the Philippines is like spectator sports!

The Philippines, it has a politics of patronage. Family and favors, in addition to the old cliche of guns, goons and gold, really do still hold a lot of sway.

Love and honesty don’t mix.

Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.

I look at western literature and especially North American literature, and I feel like it gets bogged down so much with all of that, with domestic stories and relationships and a woman dealing with the loss of her husband.

There is that potential of the expats coming back to the Philippines. But sadly they are no opportunities, no incentive for them to come back home. Successive governments have, in fact, been training them to export them rather than working on the economy to welcome them home.