Top 50 Roberto Bolaño Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Reading is more important than writing.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.”

— Roberto Bolaño

3. “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.”

— Roberto Bolaño

5. “Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”

— Roberto Bolaño

6. “There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”

— Roberto Bolaño

7. “The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

— Roberto Bolaño

8. “Every hundred feet the world changes.”

— Roberto Bolaño

9. “The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”

— Roberto Bolaño

10. “Only in chaos are we conceivable.”

— Roberto Bolaño

11. “I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.”

— Roberto Bolaño

12. “You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.”

— Roberto Bolaño

13. “We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?”

— Roberto Bolaño

14. “Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”

— Roberto Bolaño

15. “As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.”

— Roberto Bolaño

16. “If life is misery, why do we endure it?”

— Roberto Bolaño

17. “Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.”

— Roberto Bolaño

18. “Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”

— Roberto Bolaño

19. “We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.”

— Roberto Bolaño

20. “Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.”

— Roberto Bolaño

21. “One should read Borges more.”

— Roberto Bolaño

22. “Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.”

— Roberto Bolaño

23. “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”

— Roberto Bolaño

24. “The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.”

— Roberto Bolaño

25. “Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Featured in: Reading Quotes

26. “You run risks. That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny’s whims.”

— Roberto Bolaño

27. “In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats.”

— Roberto Bolaño

28. “They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him...”

— Roberto Bolaño

29. “So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it’s fun in the end.”

— Roberto Bolaño

30. “Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.”

— Roberto Bolaño

31. “In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.”

— Roberto Bolaño

32. “Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”

— Roberto Bolaño

33. “Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.”

— Roberto Bolaño

34. “The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.”

— Roberto Bolaño

35. “Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.”

— Roberto Bolaño

36. “There’s no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.”

— Roberto Bolaño

37. “When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.”

— Roberto Bolaño

38. “I’ll tell you, my friends: it’s all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.”

— Roberto Bolaño

39. “The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.”

— Roberto Bolaño

40. “The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.”

— Roberto Bolaño

41. “But every single damn thing matters! Only we don’t realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don’t realize that’s a lie.”

— Roberto Bolaño

42. “Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”

— Roberto Bolaño

43. “I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.”

— Roberto Bolaño

44. “When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.”

— Roberto Bolaño

45. “I’m an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.”

— Roberto Bolaño

46. “For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien.”

— Roberto Bolaño

47. “Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.”

— Roberto Bolaño

48. “When you die of sorrow it’s as if you’ve broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That’s sorrow.”

— Roberto Bolaño

49. “Nothing is ever behind us.”

— Roberto Bolaño

50. “Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.”

— Roberto Bolaño