“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.”

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

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.

Writers should provoke disagreement.

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.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

I’m thought to be a tough writer, but I’m really a softie.