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

Así andaban, Punch y Judy, atrayéndose y rechazándose como hace falta si no se quiere que el amor termine en cromo o en romanza sin palabras. Pero el amor, esa palabra…

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the...

Being alive always seems to be the price of something.

Come sleep with me: We won’t make Love,Love will make us.

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...

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

Amor mío, no te quiero por vos ni por mí ni por los dos juntos, no te quiero porque la sangre me llame a quererte, te quiero porque no sos mía, porque estás del otro...

A Oliveira le gustaba hacer el amor con la Maga porque nada podía ser más importante para ella y al mismo tiempo, de una manera difícilmente comprensible, estaba como por debajo de su placer, se...

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...

Lo que mucha gente llama amar consiste en elegir una mujer y casarse con ella. La eligen, te lo juro, los he visto. Como si se pudiera elegir en el amor, como si no fuera...

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face...

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with...

Pobre amor el que de pensamiento se alimenta.

you have to live by fighting each other, it’s the law, the only way that things areworth while but it hurts

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.

Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.

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.

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.

Apenas nos conocíamos y ya la vida urdía lo necesario para desencontrarnos minuciosamente.

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be...

Probablemente de todos nuestros sentimientos el único que no es verdaderamente nuestro es la esperanza. La esperanza le pertenece a la vida, es la vida misma defendiéndose.

Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.

La falta de experiencia es inevitable, si leo a Joyce estoy sacrificando automáticamente otro libro y viceversa, etc.

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

Pero el amor, esa palabra…

All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a...

hay que vivir combatiéndose, es la ley, la única manera que vale la pena pero duele

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Cómo si se pudiera elegir en el amor. Cómo si no fuera un rayo que te parte los huesos y te deja estaqueado en la mitad del patio… Vos no elegís la lluvia que te...

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).

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Negarse a que el acto delicado de girar el picaporte, ese acto por el cual todo podría transformarse, se cumpla con la fría eficacia de un reflejo cotidiano.

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred...

qué otra cosa es el amor sino reincidencia

All I have to do is to look at you to know that with you, I am going to soak my soul

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call...

Pero el amor, esa palabra… Moralista Horacio, temeroso de pasiones sin una razón de aguas hondas, desconcertado y arisco en la ciudad donde el amor se llama con todos los nombres de todas las calles,...

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of...

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

Estábamos bien, y poco a poco empezábamos a no pensar. Se puede vivir sin pensar.

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...

me atormenta tu amor que no me sirve de puente porque un puente no se sostiene de un solo lado…

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

La historia es una increíble cantidad de manotazos por todos lados, algunos agarran la manija y otros se quedan con los dedos en el aire, pero cuando sumás el todo por ahí te da la...

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

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...

Mas não, o que verdadeiramente me exasperava era saber que nunca mais voltaria a estar tão preta da minha liberdade quanto estive naquela época em que me sentia encurralado pelo mundo-Maga, e que a ansiedade...