Julio Cortazar quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Julio Cortazar on Wise Famous Quotes.

On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds.

What we call absurd is our ignorance. The Winners, 1960

Six months ago. Six, sax, sex.

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.

I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

Habits, Andrea, are concrete forms of rhythm, are that portion of rhythm which helps to keep us alive.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us ... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Why don't we go out instead of talking about people? We seem to be ghosts talking about other ghosts. It's unhealthy." "Yes,

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.

And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?

If I were a moviemaker I'd set about hunting sunsets.

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

And jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in

We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.

I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.

I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away, Since I had the blues this bad, I can't remember the day ...

I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all
directions ...

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

[Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.

Being alive always seems to be the price of something.

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

Now I am an axolotl.

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

You have to live by fighting each other, it's the law, the only way that things are
worth while but it hurts

All I have to do is to look at you to know that with you, I am going to soak my soul

Explanation is a well-dressed error.

Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

And there's blues in my bed, 'cause l'm sleepin' by myself.

Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.