Roberto Bolaño quotes - page 2

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)
Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Only in chaos are we conceivable. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Every hundred feet the world changes. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation. (Roberto Bolaño)
Poetry and prison have always been neighbors. View quote
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
How do you recognize a work of art? How can it be kept apart, even if only for a moment, from its critics, commentators, its indefatigable plagiarists, its defacers and its final destiny in solitude? Simple - just translate it. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. ... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles... View quote
Roberto Bolaño
He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules...it set new rules. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we? View quote
Roberto Bolaño
There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell. (Roberto Bolaño)
You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand. View quote
Roberto Bolaño