Julio Cortazar Quotes, Thoughts and images
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.
Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.
Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.
Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.
After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
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?
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does
The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.
Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.
Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.
What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.