Julio Cortázar Quotes

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

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.

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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

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

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.

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