There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it’s the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

Reading is more important than writing.

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only...

It was the tyrannical, slightly stupid thing you say after you’ve made love.

If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.

Only poetry isn’t shit.

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...

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

[Los alumnos de Almafitano aprendieron…]Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y...

All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we’re afraid to teach them.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers....

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness....

I steal into their dreams,” he said. “I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I’m in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I...

Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.

Vzduch venku byl kapalného skupenství. Černá, antracitová voda, vybízející k tomu, aby jí člověk položil ruku na hřbet a pohladil ji.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier’s call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were...

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

Fizeram amor no quarto de Ansky e quem os houvesse visto teria dito que fodiam como se dali a umas horas fossem mmorrer. Na realidade, Nádia yurenieva fodia como fazia grande parte das moscovitas durante...

Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of...

Toda vida, le dijo esa noche Epifanio a Lalo Cura, por más feliz que sea, acaba siempre en dolor y sufrimiento. Depende, dijo Lalo Cura. ,Depende de qué, buey? De muchas cosas, dijo Lalo Cura....

As far as Popescu was concerned, meanwhile, Dracula was simply a Romanian patriot who had resisted the Turks, a deed for which every European nation should to some degree be grateful. History is cruel, said...

I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán...

The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it’s purposeful, we can fight it, it’s hard to defeat,...

…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.

I haven’t read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could’ve read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I...

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I...

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.

I don’t know what I’m doing in Santa Teresa,” Amalfitano said to himself after he’d been living in the city for a week.”Don’t you? Don’t you really?” he asked himself.”Really I don’t,” he said to...

Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did...

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in...

Used in a personal sense, the phrase ‘achieve an end’ seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness.

Reading is never a waste of time.

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell...

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind…The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist,...

Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that’s twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and...

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our...

If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room...

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which...

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read ‘difficult’ or ‘dark’ novels like the ones he wrote. With the...

Artaud decía que escribir era una marranada, que todos los escritores eran unos cerdos, sobre todo los de ahora. Lo suscribo. Sin embargo, pese a todo, continúo admirando a los jóvenes escritores. De la misma...

I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears.

Lo vi haciendo planes, lo vi bebiendo apoyado en la ventana, lo vi recibiendo a Cesárea Tinajero que venía con una carta de recomendación de Manuel, lo vi leyendo un librito de Tablada, tal vez...