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.
Tags: writing, writers, story, horror, genre, fantasy, fantastic

Other Quotes by "Julio Cortázar"

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism 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.
Tags: science, scale, micro, macro, belief, anthropocentrism, absurdity, 20th-century
Por la mañana, obstinados todavía en la duermevela que el chirrido horripilante del despertador no alcanzaba a cambiarles por la filosa vigilia, se contaban fielmente los sueños de la noche. Cabeza contra cabeza, acariciándose, confundiendo las piernas y las manos, se esforzaban por traducir con palabras del mundo de fuera todo lo que habían vivido en las horas de tiniebla
Tags: love-quotes
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
Tags: quotes
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Tags: writing, reading
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.
Tags: writing, story
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