Manuel Puig Quotes (61 Quotes)

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

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.

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

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

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

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.

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

Writers are not meant for action.

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

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

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

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

I only understand realism.

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

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.

As a rule, one should never place form over content.

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

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.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

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.

In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.

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

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.

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

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.

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.

If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.

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

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

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

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

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

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.

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.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

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

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

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

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

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.

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

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

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?