Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

— Julio Cortázar

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

— Julio Cortázar

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

— Julio Cortázar

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

— Julio Cortázar

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.

— Julio Cortázar

Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.

— Julio Cortázar

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.

— Julio Cortázar

The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes.

— Julio Cortázar

The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.

— Julio Cortázar

The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.

— Julio Cortázar