All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.

— Julio Cortázar

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition, or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus, the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘Nouméa roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronald nor Stendhal, nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin to believe they are doing something new. Afterward, slowly, they begin to feel European again, and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.

— Julio Cortázar

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

— Julio Cortázar

An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.

— Julio Cortázar

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.

— Julio Cortázar

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.

— Julio Cortázar

As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.

— Julio Cortázar

Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.

— Julio Cortázar

Crew Que to-dos ten emos UN polo de ESA Bella Laura Que nos matinee Armando candy to-do alrededor ES tan insanamente Puerto.

— Julio Cortázar

Explanation is a well-dressed error.

— Julio Cortázar