Manuel Puig Quotes

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

Your reality, isn't restricted by this cell we live in. If you read something, if you study something, you transcend any cell you're inside of

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.

The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

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 don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

I believe in characters as vehicles of exposition. Their voices are full of hidden clues, and I like to listen to them.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

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.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

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.

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.

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.

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

And the good thing about feeling happy, you know, Valentin? ... It's that you think it's forever, that one's never ever going to feel unhappy again.

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.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

- And what's so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can't be sensitive too, if he's got a mind to?
...
- But if men acted like women there wouldn't be anymore torturers.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.

- But you have to reason it out then and convince yourself.
- Yes, but there are reasons of the heart that reason doesn't encompass.

Writers are not meant for action.

I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.

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.

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.