Quotes by Roberto Bolaño

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.

Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to ones village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before ones eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.

As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other peoples ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the new, which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.

He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books hed kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books hed bought in the last ten years, books he didnt mind lending, books that couldve been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didnt even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didnt know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldnt read anyway, because Ive already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which hes buried...Books are like ghosts

His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

Every hundred feet the world changes

Thats a pretty story, said Afanasievna as she let go of Anskys genitals. A pity Im too old and have seen to much to believe it.It has nothing to do with belief, said Ansky, it has to do with understanding, and then changing.

Were artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, dont we?

Reading is more important than writing.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

An individual is no match for history.

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other peoples ideas, like listening to music (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a womans fears.

The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If its purposeful, we can fight it, its hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If its random, on the other hand, were fucked, and well just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And thats what it all comes down to.