Julio Cortázar Quotes

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

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.

Explanation is a well-dressed error.

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).

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

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