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Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.

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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

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Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is be...more

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From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

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I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Gen...more

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I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

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When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working w...more

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The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

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Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a...more

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[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an...more

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In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in th...more

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It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to...more

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But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.