Best 21 quotes of Cesar Aira on MyQuotes

A few birds flew out from the mountains and glided for a while without sound. Standing out against the sky on high slopes beyond a range of low hills, they saw an endless herd of deer, rendered mute by distance. The landscape was reminiscent of a cardboard cutout, but on a huge scale, which gave the impression they were the ones who had become miniatures...All three of them were equally lost.

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

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.

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.

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.

A bird flashed across the empty sky. A cart immobile on the horizon, like a midday star. How could a plain like this be remade? Yet someone would, no doubt, attempt to repeat their journey, sooner or later. This thought made them feel they should bet at once very careful and very daring: careful not to make a mistake that would render the repetition impossible; daring, so that the journey would be worth repeating, like an adventure.

A drove of mules the size of ants appeared in silhouette on a ridgetop path, moving at a star's pace. The mules were driven by human intelligence and commercial interests, expertise in breeding and bloodlines. Everything was human; the farthest wilderness was steeped with sociability.

A ferramenta das vanguardas, sempre conforme minha visão pessoal, é o procedimento. (...) Construtivismo, escritura automática, ready-made, dodecafonismo, cut-up, acaso, indeterminação. Os grandes artistas do século XX não são os que fizeram obra, mas aqueles que inventaram procedimentos para que a obra se fizesse sozinha, ou não se fizesse.

Cuando uno lo ha abandonado todo, puede decirse que le queda la contemplación del vacío.

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

Em 1923, vivendo em Berlim, Kafka costumava ir a um parque, o Steglitz, que ainda existe. Certo dia encontrou uma menina chorando, tinha perdido sua boneca. Kafka naquele instante inventou uma história: a boneca não estava perdida, apenas tinha saído de viagem para conhecer o mundo. Tinha escrito uma casa, que ele possuía em casa e lhe traria no dia seguinte. E assim foi: dedicou aquela noite a escrever a carta, com toda a sinceridade. (...) No dia seguinte, a menina esperava-o no parque, e a ‘correspondência’ prosseguiu à razão de uma carta por dia, durante três semanas. A boneca nunca esquecia de enviar o seu amor à menina, de quem lembrava e a quem abandonava. Suas aventuras no estrangeiro a mantinham longe, e com a aceleração própria do mundo da fantasia, tais aventuras acabaram em noivado, compromisso, casamento e filhos, de modo que a volta era adiada indefinidamente. Isso para que então a menina, leitora fascinada desse romance epistolar, se conformasse com a perda, a que por fim acabou vendo como ganância. Privilegiada menina berlinense, única leitora do livro mais belo de Kafka. (...) Tendemos a sorrir diante do choro das crianças, seus dramas nos parecem menores e fáceis de solucionar. Mas para elas não são. Fazer o esforço de entrar nas relatividades de seu mundo equivale ao trabalho de entrar no mundo de um artista, onde tudo é signo. O contrato de uma menina com sua boneca é um contrato semiótico, uma criação de sentido, sustentada pela tensão verossímil com a fantasia. (...) para o escritor não se trata apenas de observar, é preciso descobrir os signos ocultos naquilo que se observa.

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.

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.

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

It was hard to believe that this was a route used virtually throughout the year by travelers, mule drivers and merchants. Anyone in their right mind would have regarded it as a means of suicide. Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once.

O era contradictorio, o había que redefinir el término "improvisación". Siempre se piensa que improvisar es actuar sin pensar. Pero si uno hace una cosa por un impulso, o porque le da la gana, o directamente sin saber por qué, de todas maneras es uno el que la hace, y uno tiene una historia que lo ha llevado a ese punto de su vida; y entonces, lejos de no haber pensado ese acto, no podría haberlo pensado más: lo ha estado pensando cada minuto desde que nació.

...the transformation would be accomplished not in the dimension of time but in that of meaning.

Una gran exclamación recorrió a la multitud, la exclamación se transformó en risas, en aplausos, y fue la verosimilización definitiva de la aventura. El fútbol era la realidad infinita que los abarcaba a todos, el Gran Sueño que daba continuidad a sus días y densidad narrativa a sus vidas.

Were the “pampas,” perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane?

Who hasn’t succumbed to a hopeless feeling more powerful than all the strength one might possibly muster, wondering how many first steps will have to be taken, how many actions performed and words spoken, how many labyrinths will have to be negotiated in order, finally, to reach the moment at which reality begins to happen.

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