Luis Rafael Sánchez (born November 17, 1936) is a Puerto Rican essayist, novelist, and short-story author.

Quotes

• …I have discovered that plays are easier to write than novels if the writer has a certain verbal facility, a certain capacity for the colloquial, an ear for the secret cadences of the spoken word. A play can be written with more ease than a novel…
  • On plays versus novels in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" (Sargasso, 1984)

• …every day I’m convinced that if one is firmly planted in his own world, the work necessarily appeals to a greater number of people. In that sense, I want to profit from my Caribbean self and incorporate it into my literature, hoping to give testimony to who and what I am…
  • On the lack of ubiquity regarding Puerto Rican writings in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" (Sargasso, 1984)

• …The resistance to English, the fear of English, has made us bad readers of English literature, because of our fear of contaminating the Spanish language, of losing it in the avalanche of North American influence…
  • On some people’s resistance to reading English literature in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" (Sargasso, 1984)

• Remember that Puerto Rican literature always experienced a kind of shortcoming because there was a moral obligation to write realistically, to dramatize our struggle for independence—our colonial drama. If this was ignored, it became a faulty literature which should be punished with oblivion. Imaginative literature was practically disqualified…
  • On the thematic constraints of Puerto Rican literature in “Luis Rafael Sánchez: Counterpoints" (Sargasso, 1984)

External links