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.

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...

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...

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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...

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,...

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.

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...

Every hundred feet the world changes

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...

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...

[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...

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...

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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