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Quotes by Argentinian Authors
"What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other."
"Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective."
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
"Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread."
"In my time, you needed to speak a little Italian, and that was it."
"As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless."
"All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know."
"We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe."
"Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened."
"I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had."
"Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?"
"When I raced with Mercedes, I thought I'd learn German. But my wife didn't want to live in Germany."
"Abortion isn't a lesser evil, it's a crime. Taking one life to save another, that's what the Mafia does. It's a crime. It's an absolute evil."
"Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."
"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."
"I do not know which of us has written this page."
"I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful."
"There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle."
"No amount of 'peace-building' will be able to last, nor will harmony and happiness be attained, in a society that ignores, pushes to the margins, or excludes a part of itself; it loses something essential. We must never, never allow the throwaway culture to enter our hearts! ... No one is disposable!"
"To convince oneself that one has the right to live decently takes time."
"I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious."
"There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music."
"A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."
"All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy."
"It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha."
"The difficult part was to tell the world that I was finishing."
"Paradise will be a kind of library."
"I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man."
"It's amazing, it doesn't feel like it has been 10 years since retirement."
"I was feeling a lot of confidence, so I wanted to take advantage of that and keep playing."
"We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes."
"The driver of a racing car is a component. When I first began, I used to grip the steering wheel firmly, and I changed gear so hard that I damaged my hand."
"Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved."
"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."
"Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence."
"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
"I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written."
"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."
"A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky."
"Tennis has had a very positive impact on my life."
"We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors."
"I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality."
"The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody."
"I was formerly so stuck into plans. I can now live more spontaneously. This I want not yet to give away."
"I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry."
"It makes me sad when I find sisters who aren't joyful. They might smile, but with just a smile they could be flight attendants!"
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