Work
Soto's poetry focuses on daily experiences, often reflecting on his life as a Chicano. Regarding his relationship with the Mexican-American community, Soto commented "as a writer, my duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I’m not a cheerleader. I’m one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life."
Soto writes novels, plays and memoirs, and has edited several literary anthologies. His story "The No-Guitar Blues" was made into a film, and he produced another film based on his book "The Pool Party." He is a prolific writer of children's books.
About his work Joyce Carol Oates noted "Gary Soto's poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life."
Read more about this topic: Gary Soto
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“... married women work and neglect their children because the duties of the homemaker become so depreciated that women feel compelled to take a job in order to hold the respect of the community. It is one thing if women work, as many of them must, to help support the family. It is quite another thing—it is destructive of woman’s freedom—if society forces her out of the home and into the labor market in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)