Quotes By Manuel Puig

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

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

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