Manuel Puig
If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.Collection: Positive
I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.Collection: Humor
What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?Collection: Dreams
For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.Collection: Imagination
I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.Collection: Dreams
My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.Collection: Humor
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.Collection: Poetry
I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.
Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.
Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
I allow my intuition to lead my path.
I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.
Writers are not meant for action.
Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.
What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.
We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.
The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.
The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.
Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.
One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
My pleasure was to copy, not to create.
My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.
Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.
Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.
It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.
It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.
In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.
I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.
I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.
I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.
I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.
I would very much like to become a best-selling author.
I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.
I only understand realism.
I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.
I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.
I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.
I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.
I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.
I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.
I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.