Quotes By Manuel Puig

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

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

If it's great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It's a positive force.

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.

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.

I only understand realism.

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

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.

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.

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 believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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