Roberto Bolano
Roberto Bolano
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos; 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes, and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages". The New York Times...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 April 1953
CountryChile
I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.
Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.
The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.
Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.
In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.
What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
Every hundred feet the world changes