Julio Cortazar Quotes

I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.

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

Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.

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

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.

Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny... it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape.

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does

[Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.

Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.