“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.”

Writing has to support itself.

I profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

It isn’t that there’s no right and wrong here. There’s no right.

All cultures have been mingled forever.

In England people are very proud of being very stupid.

Life is a helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.

As a child I knew almost nothing, nothing beyond what I had picked up in my grandmother’s house. All children, I suppose, come into the world like that, not knowing who they are.

I have always moved by intuition alone. I have no system, literary or political. I have no guiding political idea.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

One isn’t born one’s self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people’s ideas – and you have to work through it all.

The family feuds or the village feuds often had to do with an idea of honor. Perhaps it was a peasant idea; perhaps this idea of honor is especially important to a society without recourse to law or without confidence in law.

The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

I’ve never abandoned the novel.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.