Quotes By Manuel Puig

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.

I only understand realism.

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.

I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.

Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.