“Reading is more important than writing.”
Source: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
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Roberto Bolaño 49
Chilean author 1953–2003Related quotes
Explaining how all his novels were researched; quoted in his Guardian obituary, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/jun/25/guardianobituaries.books
“When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.”
Source: Boy: Tales of Childhood
“Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
Universal History of Infamy [Historia universal de la infamia] (1935) Preface
"Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)
The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)
Context: I want you to understand what has been done in the world to force men to think alike. It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike. Why did he not do so? Why did he make your brain so that you could not by any possibility be a Methodist? Why did he make yours so that you could not be a Catholic? And why did he make the brain of another so that he is an unbeliever — why the brain of another so that he became a Mohammedan — if he wanted us all to believe alike?
After all, maybe Nature is good enough and grand enough and broad enough to give us the diversity born of liberty. Maybe, after all, it would not be best for us all to be just the same. What a stupid world, if everybody said yes to everything that everybody else might say.
The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes — more important than gold or houses or lands — more important than art or science — more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.
“The more you read and write, the better you think and live.”
“Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.”
The Quality You Need Most, from Green Book Magazine (April 1914)