I can’t sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat.
We are what we do, especially what we do to change what we are.
My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it’s plenitude.
I am not particularly interested in saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.
I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.
The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.
Richness in the world is a result of other people’s poverty. We should begin to shorten the abyss between haves and have-nots.
The walls are the publishers of the poor.
History never really says goodbye. History says, see you later.
Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
Recordar: To remember; from the Latin records, to pass back through the heart.
I’m a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.
So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: Tell me! Tell me! The stories choose me.
Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
Almost all wars, perhaps all, are trade wars connected with some material interest. They are always disguised as sacred wars, made in the name of God, or civilization or progress. But all of them, or almost all of the wars, have been trade wars.
In the struggle of good against evil, it’s always the people who get killed.
Each time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. It’s always the same story repeating once and again and again.
I would recognise myself in each of his translations and he would feel betrayed and annoyed whenever I didn’t write something the way he would have. A part of me died with him, a part of him lives with me.
The world is a heap of people, a sea of tiny flames.
Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.