Top 60 Manuel Puig Quotes (2025 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. “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

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

24. “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

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. “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

31. “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

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

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

— Manuel Puig

36. “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

37. “I only understand realism.”

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

— Manuel Puig

48. “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

49. “We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn’t use irony to reduce their power.”

— Manuel Puig

50. “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.”

— Manuel Puig