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.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

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.

Writers are not meant for action.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

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

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

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.

-,Qué es ser hombre, para vos?–Es muchas cosas, pero para mí… bueno, lo más lindo del hombre es eso, ser lindo, fuerte, pero sin hacer alharaca de fuerza, y que va avanzando seguro. Que camine...

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

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

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren’t interested in telling that sort of thing.

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

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

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

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

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.