Julio Cortázar Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.

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

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 hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

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.

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.

All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).

La historia es una increíble cantidad de manotazos por todos lados, algunos agarran la manija y otros se quedan con los dedos en el aire, pero cuando sumás el todo por ahí te da la revolución francesa o el Moncada.

you have to live by fighting each other, it's the law, the only way that things are
worth while but it hurts