Maria

“The dilemma is not between social literature and individual literature, you all understand... The dilemma is between the serious and the frivolous [...] Yes, it's true, by far the greatest number of them write for secondary reasons [...] But there are still the others, the few who truly count, those who are serving out their dark sentence of giving word to their drama, their perplexity at this pain-wracked universe, their hopes in the midst of the horror, or of war, or of solitude...”
― Ernesto Sábato, Abaddón el Exterminador

“By the light of your premise, theme or subject precedes form. But as you make some progress with the writing, you'll see how the expression enriches, or reciprocally creates, the subject, until in the end it becomes impossible to separate them.”
― Ernesto Sábato, Abaddón el Exterminador

“You know what happened with physics, at the beginning of the century? Everything began to be called into doubt. The fundamentals, I mean, the very most basic assumptions. It was like a building that creaks and groans and you have to go down to inspect the foundations. People began to be doing not physics but rather meditations on physics. [...]

The same sort of thing has happened in the novel. The foundations have had to be looked into. Which is no coincidence, because it was born at the birth of this Western civilization of ours, and it's followed the same arc, the same trajectory, right down to this moment of collapse. Is there a crisis in the novel or is it rather a novel of crisis? Both. One delves into its essence, its mission, its worth. But it's all been done so far from the outside. There've been attempts to carry out the same examination from within, but one would have to go deeper. A novel in which the novelist him- or herself is included. [...]

I'm not talking about the figure of the writer inside the fiction. I'm talking about the possibility of the extreme case, in which it's the author of the novel that's inside the novel. Not as an observer, though, or a chronicler, or a witness [but as] just another character, the same sort of character as all the rest, which however do come from the soul or spirit or anima of the author. The author would be a man maddened, somehow, and living with his own doubles, aspects of his own self.”
― Ernesto Sabato, Abaddón el Exterminador

“He needed to talk to somebody literate, breathe some fresh, pure air, do something with his hands - make a table, repair some little girl's tricycle [...]. Do something humble, useful. Clean.”
― Ernesto Sabato, Abaddón el Exterminador