"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?"
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Quote collection
Julio Cortazar quotes (page 3 of 3)
56 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?"
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"I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself."
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"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."
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"I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does"
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"The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order."
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"[Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting."
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"Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature"
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"The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice."
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"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?"
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"I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don't think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit."
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"I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it."
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"You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room."
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"Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into."
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"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."
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"Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth."
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