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
beautiful thinking littles
I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.
winning stories knockouts
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
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.
reality keys trying
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
soul citing quoting
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
book cat age
I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
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.
reality skills stories
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.