Roberto Bolaño Quotes

I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in t...

If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first...

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

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

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time....

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind o...

When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, y...

Every hundred feet the world changes

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at le...

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of ...

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like l...

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read an...

No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the pol...

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until onl...

His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the p...

Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of ...

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

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

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others...

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined ...

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or ve...

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if...

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like l...

Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other...

Nothing is ever behind us.

His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.

…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and becaus...

While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the...

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fam...

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those w...

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

And finally the two of them plunged into the dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove ar...

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart...

Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, on...

Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely da...

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voi...

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the ...

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 ravin...

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approa...

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

Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with thei...

El silencio de la muerte es el peor de los silencios, porque el silencio rulfiano es un silencio ace...

Only poetry isn't shit.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant usel...

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s ...

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor ...

One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner wit...

Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I ...

I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I r...

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

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square....

While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only...

An individual is no match for history.

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it s...

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

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

Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twel...

I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the ...

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

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Read...

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

That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and ...

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

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. ...

I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted...

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

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

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in com...

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

I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors w...

Reading is more important than writing.

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

The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is...

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exerci...

At the bar on the Favoritenstrasse, Julius the policeman talked to us about dignity, evolution, the ...