Juan Goytisolo Quotes
"In the Europe which was created by the Second World War, divided into two blocks, each in need of a revolution that would end the abuses and injustices of capitalism and the privileges of a bureaucratic caste, collective faith does not exist."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Faith, War, Capitalism, End, Europe, Revolution, World, World war)
"When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Architecture, Actions, Now)
"The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Inspiration, Innocence, Language, Writer)
"The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Purpose, Language, Treason, Unity)
"My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile."
- Juan Goytisolo
"Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Alienation, Country, Expression, Identity, Respect)
"In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates, the writer functions totally in unison with society, and expresses society's feelings, beliefs, and hopes in perfect harmony."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Faith, Society, Feelings, Hope, Beliefs, Harmony, Religious, Writer)
"In Count Julian I simply proposed to create a text which would allow for diverse levels of reading."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Reading)
"A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Artist, Literary)
"For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Country, Earth, Order, Sense, Writing)
"I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Values, Land)
"As I began to discover my own truth and endeavored to possess it with clarity, I became more and more alienated from that which my companions held, or professed to hold."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Truth, Clarity)
"And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Experience, Day, Discovery, Intellectuals, Isolation)
"And it is because a series of elements in Spanish life which operate today the same way as they did in the times of Blanco White made obvious my relationship with him, based on a similarity in Spain's condition."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Life, Obvious, Spain, Today)
"In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre; they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Poetry, Time, Criticism, Drama, Opinion, Tyranny)