Manuel Puig's Quotes

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.

I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.

I've always wondered why there isn't a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren't interested in telling that sort of thing.

If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.

Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.

All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy.

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don't they?

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

As a rule, one should never place form over content.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.

I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I like the beauty of Faulkner's poetry. But I don't like his themes, not at all.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.