Manuel Puig

“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.”

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

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

“I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.”

“—And what's so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can't be sensitive, too, if he's got a mind to? —I don't know, but sometimes that kind of behavior can get in a man's way.—When? When it comes to torturing?”—No, when it comes to being finished with the torturers.”—But if men acted like women there wouldn't be anymore torturers.”

“My pleasure was to copy, not to create.”

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

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

“Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.”

“If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.”

“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.”

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