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
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.
wall memories thinking
Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.
memories lying past
Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.
memories echoes expectations
(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
memories teaching smell
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously...
And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?
moving thinking doe
I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does
believe letters doe
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
selfishness results humans
Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
space stories allies
The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.
games literature
Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.
zero children eye
One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers.
food salt world
Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.
mean thinking museums
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.