Julio Cortazar
Julio Cortazar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar; August 26, 1914 – February 12, 1984), was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe. He has been called both a "modern master of the short story" and, by Carlos Fuentes, "the Simón Bolívar of the novel."...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 August 1914
dream play sometimes
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.
feelings etcetera hopscotch
Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.
doors profound distraction
All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
serendipity attention analogies
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.
break-out infinite break
Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
time eye born
Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.
sleep sky missing
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.
mouths bunnies reason
Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny... it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.
writing want ifs
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
aquariums movement hours
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.
writing loss perfection
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.
taken eye thinking
I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.
eden paradise nostalgia
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?
food salt world
Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.