If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.
Manuel Puig
My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
I allow my intuition to lead my path.
We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.
I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.
I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.
I would very much like to become a best-selling author.
I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.
I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.
I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.
Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.
Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.
What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?
I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.
What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.
The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.
Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.
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 have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.
I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.
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.
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.
Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.
One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.
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?
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.
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.
I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.
As a rule, one should never place form over content.
The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.
My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.
I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.
For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.
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.
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.
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.
Writers are not meant for action.
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.
My pleasure was to copy, not to create.
My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.
Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.
In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.
