"For Luisa Valenzuela, it is erroneous to associate Latin American fiction with the French surrealist movement and with oneiric representations of reality. According to her, Latin American surrealist literature does not exist. "...although this fiction we are here concerned with is described as surrealistic or surrealist as usually happens with non-Latin American readers, it is absolutely realistic literature as you well know, but from another point of view, which could be semantic; for is this thing called reality always scoping explicable limitations or could it be philosophical or metaphysical even pataphysical? In the supplementary reality to the one we were taught to perceive, there is a cosmoginy, a world vision shared with native Americans; nothing must escape your notice but you must also learn to look again with your eyes at the very edge of what is visible. You must learn to look at the world twice." (Note in book: "From an unpublished text by Luisa Valenzuela")"

"When I was recently on a panel with Louisa Valenezuela in Seattle, she said something very wise: "Everything you write has its own time of day and its own appropriate length.""

"Fiction requires a vertical gaze-delving deeper into the non-facts, the unconscious, the realm of the imaginary. These are two very different ways of seeing the world. Fiction, for me at least, is the best way to say things. I can be much more clear-minded if I allow my imagination to take the lead-never loosing the reins, of course, but at full gallop. I also believe that, if you are fortunate, you can access the unconscious through fiction; in my case, elaborate ideas emerge in a very organized manner."

"It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth."

"I had done this all by myself. No one had performed the magic for me. I and the shapes were alone together, revealing themselves in a silently respectful dialogue. Since I could bare lines into living reality, I was all powerful. I could read."

"We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function."

"A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading."

"reading is at the beginning of the social contract"

"I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords."

"A book brings its own history to the reader."

"I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometric progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before."

"Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something not exactly defined by the word "text" unfurls, progresses, grows and takes root as I read. But how does this process take place?"

"Augustine's description of Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature."

"The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing."

"In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication."

"Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters."

"Something about the possession of a book - an object that can contain infinite fables, words of wisdom, chronicles of times gone by, humorous anecdotes and divine revelation - endows the reader with the power of creating a story, and the listener with a sense of being present at the moment of creation."

"At different times and in different places I have come to expect certain books to look a certain way, and, as in all fashions, these changing features fix a precise quality onto a book's definition. I judge a book by its cover; I judge a book by its shape."

"In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form."

"Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen."

"One can transform a place by reading in it."

"To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft."

"From its very start, reading is writings apotheosis."

"Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion."

"Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being."

"The association of books with their readers is unlike any other between objects and their users."

"I know that something dies when i give up my books, and that my memory keeps going back to them with mournful nostalgia."

"Possessing these books has become all important to me, because I have become jealous of the past."

"The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more."

"As we read a text in our own language, the text itself becomes a barrier."

"As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope."

"Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible."

"Slothful, feeble, pretentious, pedantic, elitist - these are some of the epithets that eventually become associated with the absent minded scholar, the poor sighted reader, the book worm, the nerd."

"The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A."

"Every text assumes a reader."

"It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed. Those books may no longer be available for consultation, they may exist only in the vague memory of a reader or in the vaguer-still memory of tradition and legend, but they have acquired a kind of immortality."

"Moraleja de todas las fábulas: el hombre es un animal."

"Mi culpa marcha tan lenta que siempre la alcanzan el perdón y el olvido."

"El imán humilla al hierro. Es una teoría sobre el amor."

"A menudo un dictador es un revolucionario que hizo carrera. A menudo un revolucionario es un burgués que no la hizo."

"No he notado en las feministas mayor simpatía por las otras mujeres."

"La vida es difícil. Para estar en paz con uno mismo hay que decir la verdad. Para estar en paz con el prójimo hay que mentir."

"Debió de recibir una buena noticia, porque ayer tenía el pelo blanco y hoy apareció completamente rubia."

"Más exclusivamente que en la vigilia, en el sueño somos nosotros. Contribuimos con todo el reparto."

"Revolución: Movimiento político que ilusiona a muchos, desiluciona a más, incomoda a casi todos y enriquece extraordinariamente a unos pocos. Goza de firme prestigio."

"Las mujeres son el impuesto que pagamos por el placer."

"La vida es una partida de ajedrez y nunca sabe uno a ciencia cierta cuándo está ganando o perdiendo.""

"El mundo atribuye sus infortunios a las conspiraciones y maquinaciones de grandes malvados. Entiendo que se subestima la estupidez."

"Llega un momento en la vida en que, haga uno lo que haga, solamente aburre. Queda entonces una manera de recuperar el prestigio: morir."

"En la vejez todo es triste y ridículo: hasta el miedo a la muerte."