Julio Cortazar Famous Quotes

That's how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we're like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes ... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty ... we don't have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we're very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath. ~ Julio Cortazar

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself. ~ Julio Cortazar

I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all
directions ... ~ Julio Cortazar

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. ~ Julio Cortazar

Sо they had begun to walk about in a fabulous Paris, letting themselves be guided by the nighttime signs, following routes born of a clochard phrase, of an attic lit up in the darkness of a street's end, stopping in little confidential squares to kiss on the benches or look at the hopscotch game, those childish rites of a pebble and a hop on one leg to get into Heaven, Home. ~ Julio Cortazar

Explanation is a well-dressed error. ~ Julio Cortazar

And jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in ~ Julio Cortazar

In quoting others, we cite ourselves. ~ Julio Cortazar

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often. ~ Julio Cortazar

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that's what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua. ~ Julio Cortazar

One begins to go about with the sluggish step of a philosopher or a clochard, as more and more vital gestures become reduced to mere instincts of preservation, to a conscience more alert not to be deceived than to grasp truth. ~ Julio Cortazar

To get the idea that you are the center," Oliveira thought, resting more comfortably on the board. "But it's incalculably stupid. A center as illusory as it would be to try to find ubiquity. There is no center, there's a kind of continuous confluence, an undulation of matter. All through the night I'm a motionless body, and on the other side of town a roll of newsprint is being converted into the morning paper, and at eight-forty I will leave the house and at eight-twenty the paper will have arrived at the newsstand on the corner, and at eight forty-five my hand and the newspaper will come together and begin to move together through the air, three feet from the ground, heading towards the streetcar stop. ~ Julio Cortazar

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that. ~ Julio Cortazar

At a very young age, I was influenced enormously by Julio Cortazar or Carlos Fuentes. In that literature, there's always an exploration of different perspectives, points of view. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

[Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting. ~ Julio Cortazar

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature ~ Julio Cortazar

One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers. ~ Julio Cortazar

If I were a moviemaker I'd set about hunting sunsets. ~ Julio Cortazar

Six months ago. Six, sax, sex. ~ Julio Cortazar

I envy Johnny and at the same time I get sore as hell watching him destroy himself, misusing his gifts, and the stupid accumulation of nonsense the pressure of his life requires. I think that if Johnny could straighten out his life, not even sacrificing heroin, if he could pilot that plane better, maybe he'd end up worse, maybe go crazy altogether, or die, but not without having played it to the depth, what he's looking for in those sad a posteriori monlogues, in his retelling of great, fascinating experiences which, however, stop right there, in the middle of the road. And all this I back up with my own cowardice, and maybe basically I want Johnny to wind up all at once like a nova that explodes into a thousand pieces and turns astronomers into idiots for a whole week, and then one can go off to sleep and tomorrow is another day. ~ Julio Cortazar

And there's blues in my bed, 'cause l'm sleepin' by myself. ~ Julio Cortazar

Why couldn't I accept what was happening without trying to explain it, without bringing up ideas of order and disorder, of freedom, as one sets out geranium pots in a courtyard on the Calle Cochabamba? Maybe on had to fall into the depths of stupidity in order to make the key fit the lock to the latrine or to the Garden of Olives. ~ Julio Cortazar

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters ~ Julio Cortazar

Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune. ~ Julio Cortazar

What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I've seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it's just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn't picked out, Juliet wasn't picked out. You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert. ~ Julio Cortazar

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. ( ... ) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert. ~ Julio Cortazar

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity. ~ Julio Cortazar

...one lives convinced his friends are there, that contact does exist, that agreements or disagreements are profound and lasting. How we all hate each other, without being aware that endearment is the current form of that hatred, and how the reason behind profound hatred is this excentration, the unbridgeable space between me and you, between this and that. All endearment is an ontological clawing, yes, an attempt to seize the unseizable... ~ Julio Cortazar

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons. ~ Julio Cortazar

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies. ~ Julio Cortazar

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. ~ Julio Cortazar

I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump, because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me, I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body ... ~ Julio Cortazar

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. ~ Julio Cortazar

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. ~ Julio Cortazar

I'm going to think only about you, it's the only way I'm conscious of myself... ~ Julio Cortazar

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). ~ Julio Cortazar

Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the doorknob, that act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex. See you later, sweetheart. Have a good day.
Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee. ~ Julio Cortazar

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling. ~ Julio Cortazar

I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I, first I am I, I will defend being I until I am unable to fight any longer. I am I, Atalia. Ego. Yo. A professional degree, an Argentine, a scarlet fingernail, pretty sometimes, big dark eyes, I. Atalia Donosi, I. Yo. Yo-yo, windlass and hawser. Funny. ~ Julio Cortazar

Why don't we go out instead of talking about people? We seem to be ghosts talking about other ghosts. It's unhealthy." "Yes, ~ Julio Cortazar

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice. ~ Julio Cortazar

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl. ~ Julio Cortazar

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them. ~ Julio Cortazar

A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a centre, if it was a centre, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality. ~ Julio Cortazar

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us. ~ Julio Cortazar