…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 don’t mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough that...

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 gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and...

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 himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.

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 Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this...

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 the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my...

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 on their heads.

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, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an...

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 is moderately wealthy in her old age.

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 all.

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 for discussion.

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 is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no...

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 years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to...

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 forma que admiro a los jóvenes boxeadores

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 aquel en donde José Juan dice: “bajo el celeste pavor/ delira por la unica estrella/ el cántico del ruiseñor”. Que...

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner...

Ésta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos. No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura.

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn’t cling to the edge of the abyss...

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden...

Every hundred feet the world changes

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.

One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze,...

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

Durante el tiempo en que permaneció en su celda Ivánov se hizo amigo de una rata a la que puso el nombre de Nikita.Por las noches, cuando la rata aparecía, Ivánov sostenía largas conversaciones con ella. No hablaban, como pudiera suponerse, de literatura ni mucho menos de política sino de sus respectivas infancias. Ivánov le...

So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable. Given these circumstances, it is not...

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the...

I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.

That’s a pretty story,’ said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky’s genitals. ‘A pity I’m too old and have seen to much to believe it.’It has nothing to do with belief,’ said Ansky, ‘it has to do with understanding, and then changing.

… the novel, arguably the author’s best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame’s message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

Uno no termina de leer, aunque los libros se acaben, de la misma manera que uno no termina de vivir, aunque la muerte sea un hecho cierto.

We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind...

While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he’d had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One...

While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the ‘new’, which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only...