Bolano Quotes & Sayings

Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises. — Roberto Bolano

I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell. — Roberto Bolano

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar. — Roberto Bolano

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all. — Roberto Bolano

... untill he felt Ingeborg slip two fingers into her vagina and then moisten the entrance to her ass with the same fingers and ask him, no, order, him to penetrate her, sodomize her, right now, immediately, before another moment passed, which Reiter did without thinking twice ... — Roberto Bolano

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

The strangest part of the dream,' said Pelletier, 'was the water was alive. — Roberto Bolano

Academics always feel that they deserve more. (Roberto Bolano)

Reading and enjoying fine literature is a highly cultivated and refined activity, whereas writing it is everything but so.
(xxx) — Kim Leine

Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy. — Roberto Bolano

In New York, he tried in vain to forget her. The first few days were tinged with melancholy and regret and JT thought he would never recover. Anyway: recover why? And yet, with the passage of time, in his heart he understood that he'd gained much more than he'd lost. At least, he said to himself, I've met the woman of my dreams. Other people, most people, glimpse something in films, the shadow of great actresses, the gaze of true love. But I saw her in the flesh, heard her voice, saw her silhouetted against the endless pampa. I talked to her and she talked back. What do I have to complain about? — Roberto Bolano

... no biography of his existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers ... — Roberto Bolano

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. — Roberto Bolano

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. — Roberto Bolano

Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? . What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense. Once, said Don Pancracio, Monteforte Toledo dropped this riddle in my lap: a poet is lost in a city on the verge of collapse, with no money, or friends, or anyone to turn to. And of course, he neither wants nor plans to turn to anyone. For several days he roams the city and the country, eating nothing, or eating scraps. He's even stopped writing. Or he writes in his head: in other words, he hallucinates. All signs point to an imminent death. His drastic disappearance foreshadows it. And yet the poet doesn't die. — Roberto Bolano

And I thought:History is like a horror story. — Roberto Bolano

So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely. — Roberto Bolano

If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war. — Roberto Bolano

Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark. — Roberto Bolano

For me, the word "writing" is the exact opposite of the word "waiting". Instead of waiting, there is writing. — Roberto Bolano

According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. — Roberto Bolano

When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow. — Roberto Bolano

What cannot be cannot be, besides which, it is impossible. — Roberto Bolano

He was an atheist and it had been years since he read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. 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? he asked himself. — Roberto Bolano

But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell's mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people's self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I've seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I'll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice. — Roberto Bolano

Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books. — Roberto Bolano

[He] turned his back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window any more and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room flickering, it appeared. — Roberto Bolano

I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin.
"That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously. — Roberto Bolano

Used in a personal sense, the phrase 'achieve an end' seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. — Roberto Bolano

His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. 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! — Roberto Bolano

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. — Roberto Bolano

The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight. — Roberto Bolano

Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books. — Roberto Bolano

... then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep. — Roberto Bolano

Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. — Roberto Bolano

Happy are those who own nothing. — Roberto Bolano

Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. — Roberto Bolano

[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry. — Roberto Bolano

The night was dark as pitch or coal. Stupid expressions, thought Pereda. European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there's nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below. — Roberto Bolano

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement. — Roberto Bolano

Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it. — Roberto Bolano

People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. — Roberto Bolano

Philip K. Dick died
and now we only need
what is strictly necessary. — Roberto Bolano

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines. — Roberto Bolano

In a word, and bluntly: as they walked around Sankt Pauli, it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis's house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war. — Roberto Bolano

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

According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the Swedish Academy — Roberto Bolano

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. — Roberto Bolano

Posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats ... — Roberto Bolano

Above the street, like a hanged man, swings the spot-lit sign of the neighborhood's best restaurant, closed a long time ago. — Roberto Bolano

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?) — Roberto Bolano

Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. — Roberto Bolano

They talked about what they'd felt as they rained blows on the fallen body. A combination of sleepiness and sexual desire. Desire to fuck the poor bastard? Not at all! More as if they were fucking themselves. As if they were digging into themselves. With long nails and empty hands. Though if your fingernails are long enough your hands are never really empty. But in this dreamlike state, they dug and dug, rending fabric and ripping veins and puncturing vital organs. What were they looking for? They didn't know. Nor, at that stage, did they care. — Roberto Bolano

Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in immediate past like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediate past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor. Fleeing together long ago became living together and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past. — Roberto Bolano

To sum up, as Bibiano said, quoting Parra: that's how it goes, the glory of the world; no world, no glory, not even a miserable mortadella sandwich — Roberto Bolano

It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died. — Roberto Bolano

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him ... — Roberto Bolano

Does his family have money?" I asked.
"No, Ulises's family doesn't have money," said Requena. "Actually, the only family he has is his mother, right? Or at least I've never heard of anyone else."
"I know his whole family," said Pancho. "I knew Ulises Lima long before any of you, long before Belano, and his mother is the only family he has. He's broke, that I can promise you."
"Then how could he finance two issues of a magazine?"
"Selling weed," said Pancho. The other two were quiet, but they didn't deny it.
"I can't believe it," I said.
"Well, it's true. The money comes from marijuana."
"Shit."
"He goes and gets it in Acapulco and then he delivers it to his clients in Mexico City."
"Shut up, Pancho," said Barrios.
"Why should I shut up? The kid's a fucking visceral realist, isn't he? So why do I have to shut up? — Roberto Bolano

Reading is more important than writing. — Roberto Bolano

But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization. — Roberto Bolano

I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion. — Roberto Bolano

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower. — Roberto Bolano

Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine. — Roberto Bolano

They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms. — Roberto Bolano

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy. — Roberto Bolano

For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses. — Roberto Bolano

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

Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand. — Roberto Bolano

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage. — Roberto Bolano

I haven't read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could've read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I don't mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough that you could spend twenty-four hours a day reading! And that's not to mention the bad ones, since there must be more bad ones than good ones, and at least a few of those, like anything, must be good and worth reading. — Roberto Bolano

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts. — Roberto Bolano

Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. — Roberto Bolano

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you'll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You'll find it when you need it most,
and that won't be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you'll remember me,
if only just a little. — Roberto Bolano

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight. — Roberto Bolano

If life is misery, why do we endure it? — Roberto Bolano

Hen Anne stopped and talked to me for the first time. I can't remember what we said, maybe our names and where we came from. at the end of the conversation I invited her to dinner at my house that night. It was Christmastime, or nearly, and I made a pizza and bought a bottle of wine. We talked until very late. That was when Anne told me she'd been to Mexico several times. Overall, her adventures were very similar to mine. Anne thought this was because the lives or the youths of any two individuals would be fundamentally alike, in spite of the obvious or even glaring differences. I preferred to think that somehow she and I had both explored the same map, fought the same doomed campaigns, received a common sentimental education. At five in the morning, or perhaps later, we went to med and made love. — Roberto Bolano

I prefer to not say anything, she wrote, there's no point adding to the pain, or adding our own little mysteries to it. As if the pain itself were not enough of a mystery, as if the pain were not the (mysterious) answer to all mysteries. — Roberto Bolano

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. — Roberto Bolano

Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari. — Roberto Bolano

What is a look of absolute fear? Popescu asked. The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles untile he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear. — Roberto Bolano

Right now you can cry and let your image dissolve
on the windshields of cars parked along
the Boardwalk. But you can't lose yourself. — Roberto Bolano

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. — Roberto Bolano

Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum ... We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk. — Roberto Bolano

He didn't like the earth, much less forests. He didn't like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. — Roberto Bolano

Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore. — Roberto Bolano

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. — Roberto Bolano

It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour? — Roberto Bolano

The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black. — Roberto Bolano

It would be interesting to remember the dreams I had here, at the Del Mar, more than ten years ago. I probably dreamed about girls and punishment, the way all boys that age do. — Roberto Bolano

Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured. — Roberto Bolano

One should read Borges more. — Roberto Bolano

For Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that "night of the soul" the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace. — Roberto Bolano

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. — Roberto Bolano

With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility. — Roberto Bolano

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind ... The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book. — Roberto Bolano

An intellectual can work at the university, or, better, go to work for an American university, where the literature departments are just as bad as in Mexico, but that doesn't mean they won't get a late-night call from someone speaking in the name of the state, someone who offers them a better job, better pay, something the intellectual thinks he deserves, and intellectuals always think they deserve better. — Roberto Bolano

Life, or the specter of life, is constantly challenging us for acts we've never committed. And sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing. — Roberto Bolano

We're two of a kind, that donkey and me, said Caridad in a dreamy voice. Foreigners in our own land. I would have liked to tell her she was wrong, to point out that in the eyes of the law, I was the only foreigner, but I kept my mouth shut. I put my arm gently around her waist and waited. Caridad might have been foreign to God, to the police and even to herself, but she wasn't foreign to me. I could have said the same for the donkey. — Roberto Bolano

And quick strokes of other less intimate adventures
Flashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies. — Roberto Bolano

And then we would leave, and by that time it would already be dark, and as we headed to the bus or the subway or went walking home, we would eat our sandwiches, enjoying the Mexico City night, which I've always thought is gorgeous, the nights here are mostly cool and bright but not cold, nights made for walking or fucking, nights made for talking. — Roberto Bolano

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. — Roberto Bolano