Julio Cortazar Quotes & Sayings

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that's what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua. — Julio Cortazar

For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe. — Julio Cortazar

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem's power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire. — Julio Cortazar

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself. — Julio Cortazar

All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard. — Julio Cortazar

As soon as he began to amalate the noeme, the clemise began to smother her and they fell into hydromuries, into savage ambonies, into exasperating sustales. Each time that he tried to relamate the hairincops, he became entangled in a whining grimate and had to face up to envulsioning the novalisk, feeling how little by little the arnees would spejune, were becoming peltronated, redoblated, until they were stretched out like the ergomanine trimalciate which drops a few filures of cariaconce. And it was still only the beginning, because right away she tordled her hurgales, allowing him gently to bring up his orfelunes. No sooner had they cofeathered than something like a ulucord encrestored them, extrajuxted them, and paramoved them, suddenly it was the clinon, the sterfurous convulcant of matericks, the slobberdigging raimouth of the orgumion. — Julio Cortazar

I envy Johnny and at the same time I get sore as hell watching him destroy himself, misusing his gifts, and the stupid accumulation of nonsense the pressure of his life requires. I think that if Johnny could straighten out his life, not even sacrificing heroin, if he could pilot that plane better, maybe he'd end up worse, maybe go crazy altogether, or die, but not without having played it to the depth, what he's looking for in those sad a posteriori monlogues, in his retelling of great, fascinating experiences which, however, stop right there, in the middle of the road. And all this I back up with my own cowardice, and maybe basically I want Johnny to wind up all at once like a nova that explodes into a thousand pieces and turns astronomers into idiots for a whole week, and then one can go off to sleep and tomorrow is another day. — Julio Cortazar

I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses. — Julio Cortazar

You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room. — Julio Cortazar

On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds. — Julio Cortazar

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate. — Julio Cortazar

Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are. — Julio Cortazar

I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane. — Julio Cortazar

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
— Julio Cortazar

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often. — Julio Cortazar

I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don't think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit. — Julio Cortazar

She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste. — Julio Cortazar

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature — Julio Cortazar

Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles? — Julio Cortazar

One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers. — Julio Cortazar

Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us. — Julio Cortazar

Why don't we go out instead of talking about people? We seem to be ghosts talking about other ghosts. It's unhealthy." "Yes, — Julio Cortazar

Now I am an axolotl. — Julio Cortazar

Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny ... it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut. — Julio Cortazar

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice. — Julio Cortazar

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature. — Julio Cortazar

Why couldn't I accept what was happening without trying to explain it, without bringing up ideas of order and disorder, of freedom, as one sets out geranium pots in a courtyard on the Calle Cochabamba? Maybe on had to fall into the depths of stupidity in order to make the key fit the lock to the latrine or to the Garden of Olives. — Julio Cortazar

After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others. — Julio Cortazar

Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. — Julio Cortazar

I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away, Since I had the blues this bad, I can't remember the day ... — Julio Cortazar

Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists. — Julio Cortazar

In quoting others, we cite ourselves. — Julio Cortazar

You have to live by fighting each other, it's the law, the only way that things are
worth while but it hurts — Julio Cortazar

...one lives convinced his friends are there, that contact does exist, that agreements or disagreements are profound and lasting. How we all hate each other, without being aware that endearment is the current form of that hatred, and how the reason behind profound hatred is this excentration, the unbridgeable space between me and you, between this and that. All endearment is an ontological clawing, yes, an attempt to seize the unseizable... — Julio Cortazar

When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes. — Julio Cortazar

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). — Julio Cortazar

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us. — Julio Cortazar

One begins to go about with the sluggish step of a philosopher or a clochard, as more and more vital gestures become reduced to mere instincts of preservation, to a conscience more alert not to be deceived than to grasp truth. — Julio Cortazar

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface. — Julio Cortazar

And jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in — Julio Cortazar

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.
I don't want to write anything but takes. — Julio Cortazar

It's impossible to want what I want and in the shape I want it, and share life with others besides. I had to know how to be alone and how to let so much wanting do its work, save me or destroy me ... — Julio Cortazar

I raised the camera, pretended to study a focus which did not include them, and waited and watched closely, sure that I would finally catch the revealing expression, one that would sum it all up, life that is rhythmed by movement but which a stiff image destroys, taking time in cross section, if we do not choose the essential imperceptible fraction of it. — Julio Cortazar

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. ( ... ) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert. — Julio Cortazar

La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it. — Julio Cortazar

Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe. The things you need : a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a pretty chalk drawing, preferably in colors. On top is Heaven, on the bottom is Earth, it's very hard to get the pebble up to Heaven,you almost always miscalculate and the stone goes off the drawing. But little by little you start to get the knack of how to jump over the different squares (spiral hopscotch, rectangular hopscotch, fantasy hopscotch, not played very often ) and then one day you learn how to leave Earth and make the pebble climb up into Heaven (Et tous nos amours, Emmanuele was sobbing face down), the worst part of it is that precisely at that moment,
when practically no one has learned how to make the pebble climb up into Heaven, childhood is over all of a sudden and you're into novels, into the anguish of the senseless divine trajectory, into the speculation about another Heaven that you have to learn to reach too. — Julio Cortazar

What we call absurd is our ignorance. The Winners, 1960 — Julio Cortazar

I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does — Julio Cortazar

And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation? — Julio Cortazar

You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water. — Julio Cortazar

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl. — Julio Cortazar

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects. — Julio Cortazar

I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump, because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me, I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body ... — Julio Cortazar

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word. — Julio Cortazar

The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space. — Julio Cortazar

A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a centre, if it was a centre, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality. — Julio Cortazar

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves? — Julio Cortazar

To get the idea that you are the center," Oliveira thought, resting more comfortably on the board. "But it's incalculably stupid. A center as illusory as it would be to try to find ubiquity. There is no center, there's a kind of continuous confluence, an undulation of matter. All through the night I'm a motionless body, and on the other side of town a roll of newsprint is being converted into the morning paper, and at eight-forty I will leave the house and at eight-twenty the paper will have arrived at the newsstand on the corner, and at eight forty-five my hand and the newspaper will come together and begin to move together through the air, three feet from the ground, heading towards the streetcar stop. — Julio Cortazar

When you hear a Spanish cook describe a paella or a cake, you realize she's using a much richer repertoire of adjectives than what one of us would use to characterize a book or an important experience. — Julio Cortazar

All I have to do is to look at you to know that with you, I am going to soak my soul — Julio Cortazar

Go ahead, deny up and down that the delicate act of turning the doorknob, that act which may transform everything, is done with the indifferent vigor of a daily reflex. See you later, sweetheart. Have a good day.
Tighten your fingers around a teaspoon, feel its metal pulse, its mistrustful warning. How it hurts to refuse a spoon, to say no to a door, to deny everything that habit has licked to a suitable smoothness. How much simpler to accept the easy request of the spoon, to use it, to stir the coffee. — Julio Cortazar

Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth. — Julio Cortazar

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity. — Julio Cortazar

I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them. — Julio Cortazar

[Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting. — Julio Cortazar

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us ... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction? — Julio Cortazar

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that. — Julio Cortazar

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves. — Julio Cortazar

...there are enormous regions where I have never been, and what one has not known is what one has not been. An anxiety to start running, go into a house, into that store, jump on a train, devour all of Jouhandeau, know German... What is defective is felt more as an intuitive poverty than as a mere lack of experience. It really doesn't afflict me not having read all of Jouhandeau, at most the melancholy feeling of too short a life for so many libraries, etc. The lack of experience is inevitable, if I read Joyce I am automatically sacrificing another book and vice versa, etc. The feeling of lack is sharper in... zones for detention of your eyes, your smell, your taste, and you can't get beyond that limit when you think you've caught anything fully, just like an iceberg the thing has a small piece outside and shows it to you, and the enormous rest of it is beyond our limits and that's why the Titanic went down. — Julio Cortazar

And it is also the only reward for my work: to feel what I have written is like the back of a cat as it is being petted, with sparks and an arching in cadence. (page 402) — Julio Cortazar

I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I, first I am I, I will defend being I until I am unable to fight any longer. I am I, Atalia. Ego. Yo. A professional degree, an Argentine, a scarlet fingernail, pretty sometimes, big dark eyes, I. Atalia Donosi, I. Yo. Yo-yo, windlass and hawser. Funny. — Julio Cortazar

During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature. — Julio Cortazar

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance ... something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order. — Julio Cortazar

Habits, Andrea, are concrete forms of rhythm, are that portion of rhythm which helps to keep us alive. — Julio Cortazar

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies. — Julio Cortazar

If I were a moviemaker I'd set about hunting sunsets. — Julio Cortazar

Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera. — Julio Cortazar

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into. — Julio Cortazar

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ... — Julio Cortazar

That's how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we're like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes ... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty ... we don't have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we're very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath. — Julio Cortazar

Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune. — Julio Cortazar

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order. — Julio Cortazar

Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape. — Julio Cortazar

Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself. — Julio Cortazar

We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other. — Julio Cortazar

And there's blues in my bed, 'cause l'm sleepin' by myself. — Julio Cortazar

I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all
directions ... — Julio Cortazar

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling. — Julio Cortazar

We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe. — Julio Cortazar

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons. — Julio Cortazar

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters — Julio Cortazar

What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I've seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it's just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn't picked out, Juliet wasn't picked out. You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert. — Julio Cortazar

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth. — Julio Cortazar

The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout. — Julio Cortazar

Being alive always seems to be the price of something. — Julio Cortazar

Explanation is a well-dressed error. — Julio Cortazar

Six months ago. Six, sax, sex. — Julio Cortazar

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda's, "My creatures are born of a long denial," seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge ... It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. — Julio Cortazar

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life. — Julio Cortazar

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means. — Julio Cortazar