Manuel Puig Quotes
"All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Problems, Therapy)
"Writers are not meant for action."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Action, Writers)
"Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Thinking)
"What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Work, Intuition)
"What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?"
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Dreams)
"We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Power, Irony, Needs)
"I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Fear, Taste)
"I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Life, Literary)
"I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Act, Desire, Help, Information, Reading, Writing)
"I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Decision, Literature)
"I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Work, Nature, Fantasy)
"I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Life, People, Successful)
"I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Humor, Universe)
"I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Order, states, Teaching, United, University)
"I allow my intuition to lead my path."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Intuition)
"I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Taste)
"Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: First, Literature)
"Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Reality)
"As a rule, one should never place form over content."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Content)
"Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Time, Work, Waste)
"The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!"
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Language)
"I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Constitution, Film, Nothing, Realism, Reality)
"One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Act, Attention, Reading)
"For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Imagination, Fiction, Order, Unconscious)
"The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Being, Fantasy)
"Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: People, Teaching)
"Tardiness in literature can make me nervous."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Literature, Tardiness)
"I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Name, Names, Want)
"My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics."
- Manuel Puig
"I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Childhood, Writing)
"If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: People, Positive, Force)
"If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Books, Information, Mind, Reading)
"I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Business, America, Publishing, states, United, Writers)
"I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Music)
"My pleasure was to copy, not to create."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Pleasure)
"I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Reality)
"I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Being, Difficulty, Film, Limitations)
"If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Problems, Study, Unconscious)
"I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Dreams, Cinema, Reality)
"I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Occupation)
"I only understand realism."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Realism)
"I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Work, Character)
"I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Beauty, Poetry)
"I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Writer)
"I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something."
- Manuel Puig
"I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Space)
"I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself."
- Manuel Puig
"I would very much like to become a best-selling author."
- Manuel Puig
"In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Film, Will)
"Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Hope, American, Countries, Intellectuals, Writers)
"It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Life, Hope, Hollywood)
"I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Money)
"It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Ideology, Party, Writer)
"It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Unconscious)
"Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Environment, Unconscious)
"Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: American, Cinema, Intention, Nothing, Reality, Result)
"Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Movies, Growing up, Quick, Years)
"My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Fantasy, Old, Writing)
"In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?"
- Manuel Puig
(Related: History, People, Country, France, Weight)
"My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Humor, Life)