Manuel Puig quotes
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“I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again.”
-- Manuel PuigSource : "Fictional character: Luis Molina". "Kiss of the Spider Woman", www.imdb.com. 1985.
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“Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“Your reality, isn’t restricted by this cell we live in. If you read something, if you study something, you transcend any cell you’re inside of”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I believe in characters as vehicles of exposition. Their voices are full of hidden clues, and I like to listen to them.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“As a rule, one should never place form over content.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I would very much like to become a best-selling author.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?”
-- Manuel Puig -
“Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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“I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.”
-- Manuel Puig -
“I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.”
-- Manuel Puig -
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