I locate that special problem in a character and then try to understand it. That’s the genesis of all my work. – Manuel Puig
My stories are very somber, so I think I need the comic ingredient. Besides, life has so much humor. – Manuel Puig
One performs a very different act when reading a movie and when reading a novel. Your attention behaves differently. – Manuel Puig
I’m not terribly happy about rock and roll. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot. – Manuel Puig
If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious. – Manuel Puig
I can work in films as long as the story doesn’t have a realistic nature. If I’m working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms. – Manuel Puig
I do believe that reading can help you understand what you’re writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor. – Manuel Puig
Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives. – Manuel Puig
The translator’s task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That’s hard! – Manuel Puig
I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution. – Manuel Puig
It’s essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied. – Manuel Puig
I’ve never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized. – Manuel Puig
I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn’t like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood. – Manuel Puig
The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn’t have a personal point of view, it’s impossible to be a creator. – Manuel Puig
In film, you can’t go into analytical explorations because the audience will reject that. – Manuel Puig
In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert? – Manuel Puig
It doesn’t matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope. – Manuel Puig
I haven’t been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written. – Manuel Puig
What’s better, a poetic intuition or an intellectual work? I think they complement each other. – Manuel Puig
My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs. – Manuel Puig