Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

We should try to understand our innermost needs. We shouldn’t use irony to reduce their power.

It doesn’t matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

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

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

I haven’t been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

Teaching is a good distraction, and I am in contact with young people, which is very gratifying.

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.

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.

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?

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

Writers are not meant for action.

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

I like the beauty of Faulkner’s poetry. But I don’t like his themes, not at all.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I’m not a best-seller, but through translations, I’ve accumulated some money.

I don’t have traceable literary models because I haven’t had great literary influences in my life.

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.

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

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it’s essential to be free.

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

My pleasure was to copy, not to create.

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.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor.

In film, you can’t go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that.

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.

I’ve always wondered why there isn’t a great French novel about the German occupation. The nouveau roman authors weren’t interested in telling that sort of thing.

It’s my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel’s aesthetic facade.

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.

If it’s great stuff, the people who consume it are nourished. It’s a positive force.

I don’t want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I’m suspicious.

I write novels because there is something I don’t understand in reality.

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.

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.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It’s closer to our dreams.

I allow my intuition to lead my path.

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.

I didn’t choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

Tardiness in literature can make me nervous.

As a rule, one should never place form over content.

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.

I only understand realism.

I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That’s the genesis of all my work.

I believe that people who don’t achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

I don’t think humor is forced upon my universe; it’s a part of it.

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.

What’s better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other.

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

What better model of a synthesis than a nocturnal dream? Dreams simplify, don’t they?

Most of the movies I saw growing up were viewed as totally disposable, fine for quick consumption, but they have survived 50 years and are still growing.

Whenever I write, I’m always thinking of the reader.

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

The translator’s task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That’s hard!

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

All of my problems are rather complicated – I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It’s like a personal therapy.