213 Quotes by Roberto Bolano

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Used in a personal sense, the phrase 'achieve an end' seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness.

Reading is more important than writing.

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines.

[Los alumnos de Almafitano aprendieron...]Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y a un espejo. Que no era más cómodo leer que escribir. Que leyendo se aprendía a dudar y a recordar. Que la memoria era el amor.

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

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

....Les Misérablesis a book I read in Mexico many years ago and left behind in Mexico when I left Mexico for good, and I'm not planning to buy it or reread it, because there's no point reading, much less rereading books that have been made into movies...

Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.