We never stop
reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living,
although death is certain.
Literature is a
vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange
trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made
up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and
little wildflowers.
Every hundred
feet the world changes.
Reading is
pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all its
knowledge and questions.
Books are
finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is
infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.
The truth is we
never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins
and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop
clinging to life because we are life.
If you’re going
to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.
Great
physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one
was always feeling one’s way in the dark.
Nothing happened
today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t
understand it.
The secret story
is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking
we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook
doesn’t matter.
History, which
is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants,
brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.
When you know something, you know it, and when you don’t, you’d better
learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when
what you say will advance the learning process.
There is a time
for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Only in chaos
are we conceivable.
Nothing good
ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.
There’s no place
on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
We interpret
life at moments of the deepest desperation.
Poetry and
prison have always been neighbors.
I’m an educated
man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.
You have to know
how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
We play at
believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own
works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the
Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the
precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except
the struggle to survive.
In some lost
fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats.
Reading is more
important than writing.
I’ll tell you, my friends: it’s all in the nerves. The nerves that tense
and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp
edges of companionship and love.
The diseased,
anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even
those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the
healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That
sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a
desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to
bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.
The world is
alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
Metaphors are
our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of
seeming.
Being alone
makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even
if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.
[Castellanos
Moya’s] sharp humor, not unlike a Buster Keaton film or a time bomb, threatens
the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read, have an uncontrollable
desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor
for a writer.
We’re artists
too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
…I realized my
happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and
because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.
Every book in
the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
One should read
Borges more.
When I was done
traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
You run risks.
That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places,
you are subject to destiny’s whims.
I decided to
tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.
I am dying now,
but I still have many things to say.
Exile is
courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.
