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
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.
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.
reality skills stories
Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.
stories jazz beats
A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
stories might soap
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
winning stories knockouts
The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
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.
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.