Quotes by Julio Cortazar

About Julio Cortazar:

Julio Cortázar 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."
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Cuando los zapatos aprietan, buena señal. Algo cambia ahí, algo que nos muestra, que sordamente nos pone, nos plantea. Por eso los monstruos son tan populares y los diarios se extasían con los terneros bicéfalos. ¡Qué oportunidades, qué esbozo...

Julio Cortazar

Negarse a que el acto delicado de girar el picaporte, ese acto por el cual todo podría transformarse, se cumpla con la fría eficacia de un reflejo cotidiano.

Julio Cortazar

Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.

Julio Cortazar

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Julio Cortazar

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.

Julio Cortazar

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.

Julio Cortazar

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the oth...

Julio Cortazar

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 surro...

Julio Cortazar

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 shocke...

Julio Cortazar

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Julio Cortazar

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Julio Cortazar

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 ...

Julio Cortazar

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult love...

Julio Cortazar

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Julio Cortazar

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Julio Cortazar

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

Julio Cortazar

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

Julio Cortazar

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffa...

Julio Cortazar

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Julio Cortazar

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.

Julio Cortazar

All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precise...

Julio Cortazar

Author Bio

  • NameJulio Cortazar
  • DescriptionArgentinian writer
  • AliasesJulio Denis; Jules Florencio Cortázar
  • BornAugust 26, 1914
  • DiedFebruary 12, 1984
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionLinguist; Screenwriter; Novelist; Essayist; Translator; Poet; Writer
  • WorksHopscotch