JULIO CORTAZAR

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.

And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

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.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

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

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.

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 sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.

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

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

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.

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

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.