Roberto Bolaño Quotes (49 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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By Night in Chile

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño: 49 quotes 9 likes

Famous Roberto Bolaño Quotes

“In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

“Every hundred feet the world changes”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

“We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Skating Rink

Source: The Skating Rink

“Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better”

Roberto Bolaño book Amulet

Source: Amulet

“Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Roberto Bolaño Quotes about reading

“When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.”

Roberto Bolaño

“Reading is more important than writing.”

Roberto Bolaño

Source: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

“They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him….”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

“Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

“For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Roberto Bolaño Quotes about love

“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.”

Roberto Bolaño book Amulet

Source: Amulet

“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

“Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness.”

Roberto Bolaño

2666: A Novel (2008)

“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 Bolaño

La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres.
2666: A Novel (2008)

Roberto Bolaño Quotes

“Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me.”

Roberto Bolaño

"Meeting with Enrique Lihn" (The New Yorker,December 22, 2008)
Context: Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It’s like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there’s no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing.

Literature , Falseness

“How do you recognize a work of art? How can it be kept apart, even if only for a moment, from its critics, commentators, its indefatigable plagiarists, its defacers and its final destiny in solitude? Simple — just translate it.”

Roberto Bolaño

Entre Paréntesis (2004) edited by Ignacio Echevarría, p. 223

Art

“The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either.”

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)
Context: One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either.

“There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there’s no one to give you a hand”

Roberto Bolaño

Support , Time , Forgetting

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Insufferable Gaucho

Source: The Insufferable Gaucho

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Understanding

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Flowers

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

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

Dentist
Source: Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Death , Books , Reading

“we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Life

“Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

“Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Exercises , Time , Reading , Night

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

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Education

“For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Dreams

“I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Dreams , Night

“The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Life , Children , Truth , Age

“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.”

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

Dentist
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Life , Lie , Secret , Art

“There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.”

Roberto Bolaño

Girl

“You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.”

Roberto Bolaño

“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.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Truth

“As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.”

Roberto Bolaño book By Night in Chile

Source: By Night in Chile

Time

“We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Hell

“There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Variant: There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Source: The Savage Detectives

Time

“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Way , Water , Sea

“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 Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

Girl

“Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.”

Roberto Bolaño book 2666

Source: 2666

Dance , Night

“We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?”

Roberto Bolaño book The Savage Detectives

Source: The Savage Detectives

“I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. … I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles…”

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

His experience of being imprisoned during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, as depicted in "Dance Card", p. 215
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Fear , School , Food , Sleep

“About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive.”

Roberto Bolaño

2666: A Novel (2008)

Happiness

“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.”

Roberto Bolaño

As quoted in Mining Mirror Vol. 19 (2006), p. 3

Thinking

“He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules…it set new rules.”

Roberto Bolaño

2666: A Novel (2008)

Life , Pain , People , Way

“That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight.”

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Children , Youth , Boy , Fight

“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 Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

Mauricio ('The Eye') Silva
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

“Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful.”

Roberto Bolaño

Between Parentheses. Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998–2003. ed. Ignacio Echevarría, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011 [2004]). 358.
Variant: Alternative translation: "Those who have power—even for a short time—know nothing about literature; they are solely interested in power. I can be a clown to my readers, if I damn well please, but never to the powerful." Interview with Mónica Maristain for Playboy (Mexican edition), "The Last Interview" (2003), 102, in: The Last Interview. trans. Sybil Perez (New York: Mellville House, 2009). 93-123

Feeling , Fools , Literature