José Baroja Zitate

seite 5

„Die Förderung des Lesens ist eine moralische Verantwortung von Schriftstellern.“

„Das Schreiben hat meinem Leben Sinn, Kohärenz und Identität verliehen.“

„Ohne Geld gibt es in dieser Stadt keine bleibende Fantasie!“

„Gott? Christus. Die Jungfrau. Dieses Guadalajara ist so reich an Kathedralen, so reich an Erscheinungen, dass ich sicher bin, dass dies die wahren Grundlagen der Stadt und ihres Unglücks sind: Der Regen wäscht die Sünde dieser Welt weg …“

„…Wer könnte besser als ein Lateinamerikaner über das Leid von Hunden und andere Geschichten schreiben?“

„Es war, als ob inmitten dieses Sex-Wirbelsturms alles einfacher wäre.“

“The urban allows me to explore those contradictions without falling into propagandistic or moralistic discourse; an essential matter, in my view, when it comes to literature.”

“I’m not interested in portraying the official city, the one that appears on postcards or government videos, but that other one—the one that pulses on the margins.”

“Urban life becomes a space where beauty and decay, crowd and solitude, justice and injustice coexist.”

“Urban movement and noise help me speak poetically about the social world.”

“A shadow on a wall or a stray dog sleeping in the same corner can say more than statistics.”

“The mestizo dog is an intense allegory of the Latin American condition.”

“A stray dog listens to what no one says and sees what is hidden, making him a privileged narrator.”

“In the most vulnerable, there can be dignity, memory, and poetry.”

“Chile hides its wounds with order and progress; Mexico displays them with folklore.”

“Good literature should disturb the status quo, not preach.”

“One could say I understand the city as an entity that shapes those who inhabit it, even though, in the process, it can become an anthropophagous being, merciless—especially toward the less privileged.”

“Every literary work is a political act—not in the pamphleteering sense, which has done so much harm to art, but in that intimate—and sometimes devastating—way in which a phrase, an image, a character can shake the reader enough to make them doubt their own certainties.”

“Latin America’s right-wing has no shame in throwing itself at the highest bidder — their morals shift to match whoever’s holding the purse strings.”

“His life had been a sum of half-hearted decisions.”

“While it's true that, recently, Ramiro Gutiérrez had shown a tendency toward tearful and painful literature, he had never felt the same way, for example, as the pathetic Werther or the gallant Don Quixote.”

“Today, going to schools is essential, since, just as doctors have a duty to protect life, writers must spread literature, because literature is in itself, along with art in general, the greatest form of freedom we still have.”

“In a certain way, I think that literature is capable of effectively uncovering and revealing many more “layers” of the framework that composes and hides our society and ourselves. That is, it is capable of bringing us closer to something that, for lack of a better word, I will call “Truth,” and that applies to Art itself, more than to History, more than to Anthropology, or more than to any other branch of the Social Sciences.”

“Politicians should live like ordinary citizens.”

“Trump supporters are just now realizing that Superman is the Immigrant.”

“Beware of nuns and priests, they will make you doubt your faith.”

“In a democracy, leaders must resemble people, not monarchs.”

“When politicians take over public transportation, public health, public education—that is, live like ordinary people and not like rich people—everything will be better.”

“Gaza is a wound that will never stop bleeding.”

“The right side of history is with Palestine.”