Julio Cortázar

“Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.”

“Lo que mucha gente llama amar consiste en elegir una mujer y casarse con ella. La eligen, te lo juro, los he visto. Como si se pudiera elegir en el amor, como si no fuera un rayo que te part...”

“Creo que no te quiero, que solamente quiero la imposibilidad tan obvia de quererte. Como el guante izquierdo enamorado de la mano derecha.”

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

“Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is a...”

“I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six...”

“Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.”

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

“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: a...”

“An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting...”

“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 reade...”

“All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept t...”

“I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.”

“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...”

“Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature”

“The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In quoting others, we cite ourselves.”

“Por la mañana, obstinados todavía en la duermevela que el chirrido horripilante del despertador no alcanzaba a cambiarles por la filosa vigilia, se contaban fielmente los sueños de la noche....”