Top 60 Manuel Puig Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I didn’t choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.”

— Manuel Puig

2. “Your reality, isn’t restricted by this cell we live in. If you read something, if you study something, you transcend any cell you’re inside of.”

— Manuel Puig

3. “I allow my intuition to lead my path.”

— Manuel Puig

4. “I believe that people who don’t achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.”

— Manuel Puig

5. “What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don’t they?”

— Manuel Puig

6. “I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all.”

— Manuel Puig

7. “I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.”

— Manuel Puig

8. “I would very much like to become a best-selling author.”

— Manuel Puig

9. “The nicest thing about feeling happy is that you think you’ll never be unhappy again.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

11. “Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

13. “Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.”

— Manuel Puig

14. “I believe in characters as vehicles of exposition. Their voices are full of hidden clues, and I like to listen to them.”

— Manuel Puig

15. “I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It’s closer to our dreams.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

17. “If it’s great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It’s a positive force.”

— Manuel Puig

18. “Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.”

— Manuel Puig

19. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

21. “It’s my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel’s aesthetic facade.”

— Manuel Puig

22. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

26. “I’m not a best-seller, but through translations, I’ve accumulated some money.”

— Manuel Puig

27. “If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.”

— Manuel Puig

28. “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?”

— Manuel Puig

29. “Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.”

— Manuel Puig

30. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

31. “I only understand realism.”

— Manuel Puig

32. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

33. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

36. “I don’t have traceable literary models because I haven’t had great literary influences in my life.”

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

38. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

39. “One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.”

— Manuel Puig

40. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

41. “My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.”

— Manuel Puig

42. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

43. “The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.”

— Manuel Puig

44. “Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.”

— Manuel Puig

45. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

46. “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.”

— Manuel Puig

47. “Writers are not meant for action.”

— Manuel Puig

48. “I don’t think humor is forced upon my universe; it’s a part of it.”

— Manuel Puig

49. “What’s better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.”

— Manuel Puig

50. “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.”

— Manuel Puig