Quotes from Roberto Bolano

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

I enjoy vegetarian food like I enjoy a kick in the stomach.

Mentre i messicani mangiavano carne alla griglia e patatine fritte, Fate si mise a pensare al tatuaggio di García. Confrontò poi la solitudine di quel rancho con la solitudine della casa di sua madre. Pensò alle sue ceneri che erano ancora là. Pensò alla vicina morta. Pensò al quartiere di Barry Seaman. E tutto quello che la sua memoria andava illuminando mentre i messicani mangiavano gli parve desolato.

The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter.

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.

You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

Being alone makes us stronger. That's the honest truth. But it's cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.