“Writers should provoke disagreement.”

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I’m my own writer. My material means I’m entirely separate.

If ever you wish to meet intellectual frauds in quantity, go to Paris.

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn’t know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn’t fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will – with luck – come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

The writer is all alone.

I always knew who I was and where I had come from. I was not looking for a home in other people’s lands.

Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.

Men need history; it helps them to have an idea of who they are. But history, like sanctity, can reside in the heart; it is enough that there is something there.

The world is always in movement.

You can’t deny what you’ve learned; you can’t deny your travels; you can’t deny the nature of your life.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

There are people who love those who agree with them and admire them, but have no time for those who oppose and dislike them. A Christian’s love must be universal!

That which prevents disagreeable flies from feeding on your repast, was once the proud tail of a splendid bird.

If love and agreement are manifest in a single family, that family will advance, become illumined and spiritual.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.

Victor and vanquished never unite in substantial agreement.

People flatter us because they can depend upon our credulity.