Quotes from Roberto Bolano

How much better off the poor man would be if he devoted himself to reading.

God have mercy on my soul. Sometimes I wish they'd all just die. My friend and his mother and his father and my aunt and all the neighbors and passers-by and drivers who leave their cars parked by the river and even the poor innocent children who run around in the park beside the river. God have pity on my soul and make me better. Or unmake me.

What cannot be cannot be, besides witch, it's impossible.

Every hundred feet the world changes, said Florita Almada. The idea that some places are the same as others is a lie. The world is a kind of tremor.

Un poeta lo puede soportar todo. Lo que equivale a decir que un hombre lo puede soportar todo. Pero no es verdad: son pocas cosas las que un hombre puede soportar. Soportar de verdad. Un poeta, en cambio, lo puede soportar todo. Con esta convicción crecimos. El primer enunciado es cierto, pero conduce a la ruina, a la locura, a la muerte.

So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet's Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?)

What begins as comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn't you say?

That was when I realized I was leaving my footprints all around the room. The soles of my feet were covered with blood. While continuing to move around, I carefully examined the prints. Suddenly I felt like laughing. They were dance steps. The footprints of St. Vitus. Footprints leading nowhere.

dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering...

Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary.

After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbecue pits for a crowd of invisible beings.

Por momentos puede ser maravilloso eso de que todo el mundo escriba porque uno encuentra colegas en todas partes , y por momentos puede resultar pesado, porque cualquier gilipollas iletrado se siente imbuido de todos los defectos y de ninguna de las virtudes de un escritor verdadero. Nicanor Parra lo dijo: tal vez sería conveniente leer un poco más.

I could write a treatise on the secret sources of Mexican sentimentalism. What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes and the eyes of others, we Mexicans. And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?

Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes, his manuscript hasn't been fertilized. It's sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism.

As far as Aricimboldi was concerned, Isou was a 'Romanian fuck-stick.

con la franqueza característica de los soldados y de los caballeros que saben reconocer una obra de arte cuando la ven, aunque no la entiendan.

I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate and silverware, brushed away the crumbs and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light.

He said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown.

A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it," said Espinoza.

una vida triste, llena de pequeñas mezquindades, algunas hechas sin ni siquiera mala intención.

una cosa era escribir sin la e y otra muy distinta traducir sin la e

Uno nunca termina de leer, aunque los libros se acaben, de la misma manera que uno nunca termina de vivir, aunque la muerte sea un hecho cierto.

There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

All those languages, all that whispering, simply a vicarious way of preserving our identity for an uncertain length of time.