Roberto Bolano

"Those in power (even if its only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And Ill play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful."

"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. Its like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and theres no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing."

"¿Cómo reconocer una obra de arte? ¿Cómo separarla, aunque sólo sea un momento, de su aparato crítico, de sus exégetas, de sus incansables plagiarios, de sus ninguneadores, de su final destino de soledad? Es fácil. Hay que traducirla."

"If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone."

"The secret story is the one well never know, although were living it from day to day, thinking were alive, thinking weve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesnt matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we dont realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we dont realize thats a lie."

"Its strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, cant be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died."

"One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasnt surprised that he hadnt said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either."

"I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didnt torture me, as I had feared; they didnt even rob me. But they didnt 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 couldnt 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..."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 peoples 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."