Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.
- Manuel Puig Quote

Contrary to what Kafka does, I always like to refer all of my fictions to the level of reality, He, on the other hand, leaves them at an imaginary level.
- Manuel Puig Quote

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That's the genesis of all my work.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot.
- Manuel Puig Quote

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.
- Manuel Puig Quote

If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.
- Manuel Puig Quote

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.
- Manuel Puig Quote

In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
- Manuel Puig Quote

Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.
- Manuel Puig Quote

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.
- Manuel Puig Quote

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.
- Manuel Puig Quote

Modern American cinema seems to me superficial. The intention is to understand a certain reality, and the result is nothing but a photographing of that reality.
- Manuel Puig Quote

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.
- Manuel Puig Quote

My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.
- Manuel Puig Quote

One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently.
- Manuel Puig Quote

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.
- Manuel Puig Quote

The essayist has to follow a certain intellectual pattern. The novelist has the advantage of using fantasy, of being subjective.
- Manuel Puig Quote

The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator.
- Manuel Puig Quote

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn't use irony to reduce their power.
- Manuel Puig Quote

What's better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.
- Manuel Puig Quote

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.
- Manuel Puig Quote