For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.

— Julio Cortázar

Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.

— Julio Cortázar

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.

— Julio Cortázar

In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

— Julio Cortázar

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentric that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).

— Julio Cortázar

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentric that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

— Julio Cortázar

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.

— Julio Cortázar

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

— Julio Cortázar

La MAGA did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.

— Julio Cortázar

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.

— Julio Cortázar