Eduardo Galeano Quotes

A book is a book is a book.

Literature is a house with many mansions.

That complete statement which is literature.

For me, graffiti writers were always the fascinating eccentrics of hip-hop culture. What they do is secretive by definition, and not remunerative in any way.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

Graffiti is linear, and it's done with a pencil, and it's like writing on walls.

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

I didn't start doing graffiti until two years after I got to New York. Jean Michel Basquiat was one of my main inspirations for doing graffiti. For a year I didn't know who Jean Michel was, but I knew his work.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

I feel I'm functioning at some level as a journalist because even though I write fiction, I'm trying to get the world accurate.

I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

I write them, I don’t explain them.

Literature is a far more ancient and viable thing than any social formation or state. And just as the state interferes in literature, literature has the right to interfere in the affairs of state.

The best art is on the street.

I think a good story can do as much as a novel; not the exact same thing, of course, but just as much artistically. They're different beasts, but to tackle an expansive country like the United States, you're either going to write a big novel, or go in to various points on the map and write stories or poems.

The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.

I write in Urdu and everything is written by my hand.

When we used to walk to school, I used to read off the walls, graffiti and stuff, everything. I used to write stories, but I'd never finish them. I wrote poems.