Roberto Bolaño Quotes

Every hundred feet the world changes

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

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.

Nothing is ever behind us.

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

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

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

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

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.

The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

Reading is more important than writing.

As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.

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

…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.

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

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

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?

No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she'd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.

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

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.

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

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

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

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's fears.

An individual is no match for history.

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

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

Only poetry isn't shit.

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