The Savage Detectives

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

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

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

Problems. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.

And after screwing, mi general liked to go out into the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and think about postcoital sadness, that vexing sadness of the flesh, and about all the books he hadn’t read

There’s nothing like traveling to expand your horizons… When I was done traveling I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.

Why do I have to like the worst ones? I thought, why do I have to be attracted to the most brooding, least cultured, most desperate ones? It's a question I ask myself twice a year. I still haven't found an answer.

Some unemployed person could reproach me for being incapable of happiness, even though I had everything. I could reproach a murderer for committing murders, and a murderer could reproach a suicide victim for his desperate or enigmatic last act.

Ernesto San Epifanio had said that all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual, although he didn't say so.

You don't have to lie to me, I know you. You're rich and spoiled, but you're very ambitious. And lucky. You'll go as far as you want to go. Although here I see that you'll lose your way several times, and it'll be your own fault, because you don't know what you want. You need a girl to stand by you in good times and bad. Am I wrong?