Cesar Aira Quotes & Sayings

I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally. — Cesar Aira

... every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out. — Cesar Aira

He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass. — Cesar Aira

Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o'clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions. — Cesar Aira

Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already. — Cesar Aira

Everything is made of words, and the words had done their job. I could even say they had done it well. They had risen in a confusing swarm and spun around in spirals, ever higher, colliding and separating, golden insects, messengers of friendship and knowledge, higher, higher, into that region of the sky where the day turns into night and reality into dreams, regal words on their nuptial flight, always higher, until their marriage is finally consummated at the summit of the world. — Cesar Aira

A few birds flew out from the mountains and glided for a while without sound. Standing out against the sky on high slopes beyond a range of low hills, they saw an endless herd of deer, rendered mute by distance. The landscape was reminiscent of a cardboard cutout, but on a huge scale, which gave the impression they were the ones who had become miniatures ... All three of them were equally lost. — Cesar Aira

The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. — Cesar Aira

Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past. — Cesar Aira

At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's. — Cesar Aira

Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others. — Cesar Aira

A memory is a luminous miniature, like the hologram of the princess, in that movie, that the faithful robot carried in his circuits from galaxy to galaxy. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting. All movement, the great horizon, the journey, is a spasm of forgetting, which bends in the bubble of memory. Memory is always portable, it is always in the hands of a wandering automaton. — Cesar Aira

Each instant was different and new and unrepeatable. That was the very nature of time, ceaselessly realizing itself, in every life. — Cesar Aira

So familiar that it didn't even register in the conversation; but it did reappear when I laid it out on the table of my dreams. — Cesar Aira

I was almost unimaginably vague, not because I was stupid, but because nothing really mattered to me. This is an enormous paradox, because everything mattered to me, far too much; I made a mountain out of every molehill, and that was my main problem... I might have seemed indifferent, but nothing could have been further from the truth and I knew it. — Cesar Aira

Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon. — Cesar Aira

I beg you not to read anything threatening, or even prophetic, into my words, Mr. Clarke. Simply take them as a description, or a 'law' if you like. This circle around a law is a world in miniature within our world, which itself is a miniature. We create the world to fit in with our personal system, so that man can become world. In other words, so that the miniature can become miniature. But miniatures have their own laws, you know. It is not only space which can become minute: it also happens to the corresponding time, which becomes extremely fast. That is why life is so short. — Cesar Aira

The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world. — Cesar Aira

He couldn't believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer's privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present. — Cesar Aira

I don't know who explained this rule to me; maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn't understand, and I understood almost nothing. — Cesar Aira

Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane? — Cesar Aira

In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote. — Cesar Aira

Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality. — Cesar Aira

I have not the least sympathy for these useless and destructive pastimes, football and politics. — Cesar Aira

I was sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. I possessed the keys to pain. — Cesar Aira

The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity — Cesar Aira

Her tone spoke less of nostalgia than reproach, of feelings long coveted and repeated whenever she had the chance. — Cesar Aira

This was one of those situations in which the whole is not enough. Perhaps because there were other "wholes," or because the "whole" made up by the speaker and his personal world rotates like a planet, and the combined effect of rotation and orbital movement is to keep certain sides of certain planets permanently hidden. — Cesar Aira

Each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve. — Cesar Aira

I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible. — Cesar Aira

There is something dreamlike about the points that provide a view of the other side, but they belong not so much to the dreamtime as to dream work. The nomads enter the dreamtime not by setting off on some extraordinary, dangerous voyage, but through their everyday, ambulatory movement. — Cesar Aira

No one leaves life anywhere, all lives seem to be portable. They are naturally so. To be practical about it and drop the metaphysics, having a life is equivalent to having business, affairs, interests. And how can anyone strip himself of all that? Very well. But then how did I do it?
I don't know.
I've stood on the threshold of all the beauties, all the dangers. And the sums did not add up. The remainders did not remain, the multiplications were not multiplied, the divisions were not divided. — Cesar Aira

The voice, for its part, has the peculiarity that when released it carries the weight of the body from which it has come; since that weight is erotic reality, lovers believe they can embrace words of love, they believe they can make them into a continuum of love that will last forever. — Cesar Aira

It was one of those cases in which the real is irreplaceable and not representable. Unfortunately for them, the real was also instantaneous and without future. — Cesar Aira

Everyone likes ice cream," he said, white with rage. The mask of patience was slipping, and I don't know how I managed to hold back my tears. "Everyone except you, son, because you're a moron. — Cesar Aira

She belonged to the common type: without ever really thinking it over in detail, she had considered herself a woman like the rest, with no reason for anything to happen to her that didn't also happen to all other women. It was as if this sort of thing happened to someone else, to an absolute someone else, which is to say, as if it didn't happen to anyone. — Cesar Aira

I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs ... — Cesar Aira

But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the "dreamtime," that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name indicates. A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example, the snake that dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These.. curious Aborigines make sure their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they were asleep. — Cesar Aira

A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things. — Cesar Aira

Impunity: it's always impunity that gets you dancing. What did I care about
being ridiculous? I was on my way to earning a superior kind of impunity, and
nobody knew it. — Cesar Aira