Julio Cortázar, Around The Day In Eighty Worlds Quotes
All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).
Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.