The Reading Room

“Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.”

“I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.”

“Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.”

“There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn't be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.”

“The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.”

“One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.”

“When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.”

“I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.”

“In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.”

“I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.”

“I never get the feeling that I've decided rationally, cold-bloodedly to write a story. On the contrary, certain events or people, sometimes dreams or readings, impose themselves suddenly and demand attention.”

“Good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is, without a doubt, hard work. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular, there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.”

“I wouldn't reread Sartre today. Compared to everything I've read since, his fiction seems dated and has lost much of its value.”

“I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.”

“When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.”

“Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.”

“Le raccontai tutta la mia vita, non quella passata ma quella che avrei vissuto in futuro.”

“Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.”

“Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.”

“To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.”

“The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.”

“No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

“I remember, when I was young, to have a literary or artistic vocation was really dramatic because you were so isolated from the common world. You felt that you were marginal, and if you dared to try to organise your life around your vocation, you knew you'd be completely segregated.”

“Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don't believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life.”

“You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.”

“When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.”

“Each book, for me, has been an adventure, a period of time dedicated to study, to document certain facts, to traveling, and also to fantasize and to invent.”

“I remember how my world expanded in amazing fashion by that magical operation of translating words into images, and images into stories.”

“There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.”

“If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.”

“In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.”

“It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.”

“I love stories, and my life is principally concentrated on stories, but not with a pretense of scientific precision.”

“Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.”

“Couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.”

“El secreto de la felicidad, o, por lo menos, de la tranquilidad, es saber separar el sexo del amor. Y, si es posible, eliminar el amor romántico de tu vida, que es el que hace sufrir. Así se vive más tranquilo y se goza más.”