Roberto Bolaño Quotes

“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.”

"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.

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

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

“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”

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.

“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.”

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

Source: The Savage Detectives

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

Source: 2666

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

Dentist
Source: Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

“Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”

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.”

Source: The Savage Detectives

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

Source: The Savage Detectives

“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.”

Source: The Savage Detectives

“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.”

Source: 2666

“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.”

Source: The Savage Detectives

“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.”

Source: 2666

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

Dentist
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

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

“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.”

“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.”

Source: The Savage Detectives

Roberto Bolaño book By Night in Chile

Source: By Night in Chile

“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.”

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

Source: 2666

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

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

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

Source: 2666

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

Source: The Savage Detectives

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

Source: 2666

“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…”

Source: The Savage Detectives

“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.”

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

“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.”

2666: A Novel (2008)

“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.”

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

“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.”

2666: A Novel (2008)

“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.”

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.”

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