Top 30 Manuel Puig Quotes

I write novels because there is something I don’t understand in reality.

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.

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

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.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

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

I only understand realism.

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

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

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

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 doesn’t matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

Whenever I write, I’m always thinking of the reader.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

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.

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It’s closer to our dreams.

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

Writers are not meant for action.

I’m not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

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

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That’s the genesis of all my work.

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.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it’s essential to be free.

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

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.