Quotes By Manuel Puig

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.

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.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

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.

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.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

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.

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.

In film, you can't go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

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.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

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.

Writers are not meant for action.