Julio Cortazar
Julio Cortazar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar; August 26, 1914 – February 12, 1984), was an Argentine novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe. He has been called both a "modern master of the short story" and, by Carlos Fuentes, "the Simón Bolívar of the novel."...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 August 1914
order rupture surprise
The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.
eye cutting kissing
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
important literature virtue
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
mean machines stories
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
literature helping destruction
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?
memories speak deceiving
Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.
thinking people rabbits
I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don't think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.
important
Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?
age littles old-age
After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
believe absurd
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
thinking vanity want
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
book drug quality
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
eye color kingdoms
Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.
literature creation unusual
The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.