Cesar Aira Quotes

#1. At this stage of my life, I had reached the conclusion that I would never be the protagonist of any story. The only thing I could hope for was to make an appearance in somebody else's.

Cesar Aira

#2. I have not the least sympathy for these useless and destructive pastimes, football and politics.

Cesar Aira

#3. Everyone likes ice cream," he said, white with rage. The mask of patience was slipping, and I don't know how I managed to hold back my tears. "Everyone except you, son, because you're a moron.

Cesar Aira

#4. Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.

Cesar Aira

#5. Like in a dream, everything seemed to be on the point of vanishing but at the same time ablaze with persistent reality.

Cesar Aira

#6. Why is it that drama always starts late? Whereas comedy always seems to have started already.

Cesar Aira

#7. Forgetting is like a great alchemy free of secrets, limpid, transforming everything to the present. In the end it makes our lives into this visible and tangible thing we hold in our hands, with no folds left hidden in the past.

Cesar Aira

#8. Every morning, and every night, I resolved to start a new life, but I always procrastinated, acquiescing to my ailing willpower. And Saturday at eleven o'clock at night was not the right moment to make important decisions.

Cesar Aira

#9. The voice, for its part, has the peculiarity that when released it carries the weight of the body from which it has come; since that weight is erotic reality, lovers believe they can embrace words of love, they believe they can make them into a continuum of love that will last forever.

Cesar Aira

#10. The strangeness that made everything sparkle came from me. Worlds rose out of my bottomless perplexity

Cesar Aira

#11. Were the "pampas," perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane?

Cesar Aira

#12. I'm following it perfectly. Although, if this were a novel, I'd take the trouble to reread the last paragraph as carefully as possible.

Cesar Aira

#13. I was sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. I possessed the keys to pain.

Cesar Aira

#14. In barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote.

Cesar Aira

#15. He had developed a superstitious fear of the instant, that tiny hole through which all the time available to human beings must pass.

Cesar Aira

#16. I don't know who explained this rule to me; maybe it was the product of my own speculations and fantasies. That would have been typical: I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn't understand, and I understood almost nothing.

Cesar Aira

#17. Her tone spoke less of nostalgia than reproach, of feelings long coveted and repeated whenever she had the chance.

Cesar Aira

#18. There is something dreamlike about the points that provide a view of the other side, but they belong not so much to the dreamtime as to dream work. The nomads enter the dreamtime not by setting off on some extraordinary, dangerous voyage, but through their everyday, ambulatory movement.

Cesar Aira

#19. I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs ...

Cesar Aira

#20. He couldn't believe that sleep had robbed him of this spectacle night after night. Such are the writer's privileges, he thought, nostalgic already for the present.

Cesar Aira

#21. Poison or elixir, narcotic or aphrodisiac, whatever it was, this flower, relic of a day in the life of an accidental writer, an inadvertent counterfeiter leaving his traces in code, the birds were coming to try it, performing a dance for no one and flying up toward the moon.

Cesar Aira

#22. So familiar that it didn't even register in the conversation; but it did reappear when I laid it out on the table of my dreams.

Cesar Aira

#23. It was one of those cases in which the real is irreplaceable and not representable. Unfortunately for them, the real was also instantaneous and without future.

Cesar Aira

#24. A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I'm so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.

Cesar Aira

#25. Impunity: it's always impunity that gets you dancing. What did I care about
being ridiculous? I was on my way to earning a superior kind of impunity, and
nobody knew it.

Cesar Aira

#26. The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world.

Cesar Aira

#27. Each instant was different and new and unrepeatable. That was the very nature of time, ceaselessly realizing itself, in every life.

Cesar Aira

#28. Each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve.

Cesar Aira

#29. The sadness inherent in any memory comes from the fact that its object is forgetting.

Cesar Aira

#30. I clung on to time, and consequently to learning, the only human activity that makes time our ally.

Cesar Aira