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Always a blast.

".. we have normality, i repeat we have normality.' She turned her microphone off then turned it back on with a slight smile and continued: "Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem."

"...Alberto's most substantial response to Breton's dismissive claim that 'Everyone knows what a head is'. The most searching and resourceful sculptor of the twentieth century would show how misguided the leader of organised intellectual revolution could be."

"....Alberto's most substantial response to Breton's dismissive claim that 'Everyone knows what a head is'."

Why I love reading!

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good."

"It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there's no point to it, since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcizing it as spectacle."

At "end of the game" and need to take a break because his writing is so good!
35 stories in this collection. Not to be confused with the smaller collection titled "Bestiario".

At "end of the game" and need to take a break because his writing is so good!

The story of a life...
"I told him not to worry, that committing to great art is its own reward."
"Imagining the anguish that drew him to write this letter brought me to tears"
"It was the Edward Hopper version of Dunkin Donuts."
"We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone."

From the father of surrealism.
"I was talking to Picasso in the balcony during the intermission"
"There is no use being alive if one must work"
"No, it was not yet these who would be ready to create the Revolution"
"Life is other than what one writes"

A wonderful read. The words "samovar" and "galoshes" are appearing frequently in my reads! May you always feel the need to chase cats!

Its always a joy reading Javier Marias.
He has a talent of beautifully forming an image of a character effortlessly and resonating with passages and phrases several pages earlier.