Roberto Bolaño

Quotes

• “¿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.”
• “Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful.”
• “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 we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.”
• “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”
• “It's 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, can't 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.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born

Roberto Bolaño Ávalos , ( 1953-04-28 ) 28 April 1953, Santiago , Chile

Died

15 July 2003 (2003-07-15) (aged 50), Barcelona , Spain

Occupation

Writer poet

Language

Spanish

Notable works

The Savage Detectives (1998) 2666 (2004)

via Wikipedia infobox