Quotes By Manuel Puig

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.

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

As a rule, one should never place form over content.

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.