I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

- Manuel Puig

I am very interested in what has been called bad taste. I believe the fear of displaying a soi-disant bad taste stops us from venturing into special cultural zones.

- Manuel Puig

I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.

- Manuel Puig

I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot, but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood.

- Manuel Puig

I began teaching in New York because I needed to stay in the United States and didn't have my immigration papers in order, so working for a university was a way of resolving the issue.

- Manuel Puig

Kafka truly illustrates the way the environment oppresses the individual. He shows how the unconscious controls our lives.

- Manuel Puig

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

- Manuel Puig

I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized.

- Manuel Puig

I'm not a best-seller, but through translations, I've accumulated some money.

- Manuel Puig

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

- Manuel Puig

My greatest aspiration was always to live in the tropics.

- Manuel Puig

I only understand realism.

- Manuel Puig

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

- Manuel Puig

I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.

- Manuel Puig

I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.

- Manuel Puig

I don't think humor is forced upon my universe; it's a part of it.

- Manuel Puig

I don't have traceable literary models because I haven't had great literary influences in my life.

- Manuel Puig

I didn't choose literature. Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side.

- Manuel Puig

I believe that people who don't achieve anything in life are isolated and resent those that are successful.

- Manuel Puig

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry.

- Manuel Puig