Quotes By Manuel Puig

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

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 a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

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.

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.

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.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

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

I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.

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

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.

Writers are not meant for action.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.