Roberto Bolaño quotes

Roberto Bolaño was a Chilean novelist, poet, and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the most important Latin American authors of his generation. His works, such as "The Savage Detectives" and "2666", explore themes of exile, literature, and the complexities of modern life. He gained international acclaim for his inventive storytelling and deeply literary voice. Here are 53 of his quotes:

If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone.

Roberto Bolaño

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

Roberto Bolaño

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.

Roberto Bolaño

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

Roberto Bolaño

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

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

Roberto Bolaño

It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died.

Roberto Bolaño

There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

Roberto Bolaño

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

Roberto Bolaño

Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful.

Roberto Bolaño

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. 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

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

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

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

Roberto Bolaño

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

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

Roberto Bolaño