Quotes from Manuel Puig

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

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

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

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.

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?

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

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

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

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

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I only understand realism.

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

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.