Julio Cortázar Quotes

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best ...

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outsi...

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all ...

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the ...

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we...

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

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I wen...

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behin...

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

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves y...

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it det...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends t...

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ...

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

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machi...

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

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

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

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves y...

Explanation is a well-dressed error.

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciou...

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

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

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creatu...

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpo...

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing ...

All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager...

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, the...

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endl...

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ...

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

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green pa...

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

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist ...

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execut...

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a per...