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!

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

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 terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

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 have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

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.

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

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

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

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.

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.

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.

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

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

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

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

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

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