Roberto Bolaño

author, poet

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Assassins and converts
chit-chatting
with the deaf and mute,
with imbeciles turned loose from Purgatory

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

a common face
a rather portly guy
with a desk clerk's eyes, not a surrealist's
though now all the surrealists, all the poets
have the eyes of desk clerks

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

There are so few readers of poetry that to publish it is almost a gratuitous or futile act.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Over the following days my life seemed to return to its normal course. Pure and simple despair alternated with depressive episodes.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

As Nicanor Parra said: it might be a good idea to do a little more reading.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Sometimes the fact that everyone in the world writes can be wonderful, because you find fellow-writers everywhere, and sometimes it can be a drag because illiterate jerks strut around sporting all the defects and none of the virtues of a real writer.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Life is supply and demand but that's no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Thoughtlessly, I would get an urge to cry, and I’d get into the water and swim, and when I had already gotten myself pretty far from shore I’d look up at the sun and it would seem strange to me that it was there, so big and so different from us…

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Everything I have written is a letter of love or goodbye.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

I dreamt that a man was looking back over the anamorphic landscape of dreams, and his gaze, though hard as steel, splintered into multiple gazes, each more innocent, each more defenseless.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

He will be the only member of the group to see the day dawning and the disastrous retreat of the night wanderers, each an enigmatic letter in an imaginary alphabet.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

He opened the door at the end of long corridor that resembled Chile

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

If you have patience enough to search, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re looking for. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the state. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

I’ve always thought autobiographies were odious. What a waste of time trying to pass a cat off as a rabbit, when what a real writer should do is snare dragons and dress them up as rabbits.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

Death caught up with me in a Paris disco at four in the morning.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best.

[Roberto Bolaño @bolano]

There is no lyric poetry that isn’t the gurgle or chuckle of egoists, the murmur of cheats, the babble of traitors.