A biography for Manuel Puighasn’t been written yet.
“As a rule, one should never place form over content.”
“Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.”
“Writers are not meant for action.”
“For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.”
“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 write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.”
“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.”
“It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.”
“I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.”
“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.”
“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.”
“My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.”
“I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.”
“Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.”
“Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.”
“I only understand realism.”
“I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.”
“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 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.”
“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.”