Quotes from Roberto Bolano

Instead I waited, which is what the Nude Descending a Staircase does, contrary to one's expectation and which is exactly why it has always provoked such a peculiar critical response.

ter uma idéia do mundo, de certa maneira, é coisa fácil, todo o mundo tem, geralmente uma idéia circunscrita à sua aldeia, limitada ao torrão, às coisas tangíveis e medíocres que cada um tem diante dos olhos, e essa idéia do mundo, mesquinha, limitada, cheia de sebo familiar, costuma sobreviver e adquirir, com o passar do tempo, autoridade e eloqüência.

There are fourteen million people living in Mexico City. I'll never see the visceral realists again. And I'll never go back to the university or to Álamo's workshop either. I don't know what I'm going to tell my aunt and uncle. I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louys, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.

His observations on certain hard drugs give him a kinship to the great chroniclers of hell, except that in Burroughs there's no moral or ethical motive, only the description of a frozen abyss, the description of an endless process of corruption. Language, he said, is a virus from outer space, in other words, a disease, and he spent his whole life trying to fight that disease.

She says to the fog: it's all right, I'm staying with you

My friend (if I may still call him that) believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are.

La literatura es una máquina acorazada. No se preocupa de los escritores. A veces ni siquiera se da cuenta de que éstos están vivos. Su enemigo es otro, mucho más grande, mucho más poderoso, y que a la postre la terminará venciendo, pero ésa es otra historia.

Compreendo o senhor, disse Marco Antonio Guerra. Quero dizer, se não me engano, creio que o compreendo. O senhor é como eu e eu sou como o senhor. Não estamos à vontade. Vivemos num ambiente que nos asfixia. Fazemos como se não acontecesse nada, mas acontece sim. O que acontece? Nos asfixiamos, caralho. O senhor se desafoga como pode.

An unforgettable love, and brief. Like a hurricane? No, a love as brief as the sigh of a guillotined head, brief like beauty, absolute beauty

In other words: Allende's work is bad, but it's alive; it's anaemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it's alive. It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it's alive. And there's always the possibility of a miracle.

The thing was, I didn't love him anymore. You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a whole poetry movement.

Tentou dizer alguma coisa num par de ocasiões, mas não conseguiu, o silêncio dela, porém, não era desagradável nem implicava rancor ou tristeza. Não era denso mas transparente. Quase não ocupava espaço. Inclusive, pensou Espinoza, você poderia se acostumar a esse silêncio e ser feliz. Mas ele não se acostumaria nunca, isso ele também sabia.

That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave.

said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our

those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon.

They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack. Anyway, they must be saying things like how was your day, I'm tired, there's an avocado sandwich in the kitchen, thanks, thanks, a beer in the refrigerator.

Pero la poesía (la verdadera poesía) es así: se deja presentir, se anuncia en el aire, como los terremotos que según dicen presienten algunos animales especialmente aptos para tal propósito. (Estos animales son las serpientes, los gusanos, las ratas y algunos pájaros.)

I preferred not to respond. (Although several replies occurred to me.)

I hope you die, I said. I hope I die, he said, and then he said: I know I'm going to die.

We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep.

El mundo de la literatura es terrible, además de ridículo, decía. Y añadía que ni siquiera el repetido encuentro con un mismo jurado constituía de hecho un peligro, pues estos generalmente no leían las obras presentadas o las leían por encima o las leían a medias.

Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas—the pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that's what they're like.

Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism, or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book?

Ulazim u njihove snove. Ulazim u njihove najsramnije misli, u svakom sam drhtaju, u svakom gr?u njihovih duša, uvla?im se u njihova srca, ispipavam njihove najtemeljnije predodžbe, motrim njihove bezumne porive, njihova neizraziva ?uvstva, spavam u njihovim plu?ima ljeti i u njihovim miši?ima zimi, i sve to ?inim bez i najmanjeg napora, ne zahtijevaju?i to, ne mole?i ni traže?i, bez ikakve prisile, nagnan samo predanoš?u i ljubavlju.