Julio Cortazar Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Julio Cortazar quote about:
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“The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.”
-- Julio Cortazar -
“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?”
-- Julio Cortazar
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