Manuel Puig

Author

1932-12-28

Quotes by Manuel Puig

• — And what's so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can't be sensitive, too, if he's got a mind to? — I don't know, but sometimes that kind of behavior can get in a man's way.— When? When it comes to torturing?—— No, when it comes to being finished with the torturers.—— But if men acted like women there wouldn't be anymore torturers.

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• I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

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• I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

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• — And what's so bad about being soft like a woman? Why is it men or whoever, some poor bastard, some queen, can't be sensitive, too, if he's got a mind to? — I don't know, but sometimes that kind of behavior can get in a man's way.— When? When it comes to torturing?—— No, when it comes to being finished with the torturers.—— But if men acted like women there wouldn't be anymore torturers.

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• My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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

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• I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

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