Manuel Puig Quotes

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

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.

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

I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.

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.

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?

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

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

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

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

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

Writers are not meant for action.

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

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

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

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.

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

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

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

Being a man (male "macho") does not give you right to anything.

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

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

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

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

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

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

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

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

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.

I only understand realism.

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

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