When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Interpretation
Writing is an inherent need for some individuals, regardless of circumstances.
This quote by Julio Cortazar highlights the innate drive of a writer to express themselves through writing. It suggests that whether motivated by desire or obligation, the act of writing is an essential part of the writer's existence, indicating a deep connection to the craft that transcends external factors.
In practice
In a speech at a literary festival to inspire aspiring writers.
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I donβt want to write anything but takes.
Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
My duty is to make probable the improbable. If I tell you how I did it, I will ruin your experience.
For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.
Shakespeare - The nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.
Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered, and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine mirror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner engraved on the back.
As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.
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