Rosa Montero famous quotes

At any given time, if you live long enough, old age catches you . . . the only choices we have in life are either the impairment of old age or early death.
-- Rosa Montero

#Long #Choices #Age

The truth about being a writer is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways.
-- Rosa Montero

#Dream #Book #Writing

It's true that a human being cannot control what happens to him. However, what we can control is how we respond to what happens to us, what we do with what happens to us. Even if the range of choice is minimal, there is always a choice. From that point of view, destiny is our battlefield. It's not a tragedy; it is what we do with it.
-- Rosa Montero

#Destiny #Choices #Tragedy

For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me - I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired - it is something essential and structural. It's like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don't know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words.
-- Rosa Montero

#Writing #Manage

One of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us and you can't shake it off, since it was so easy, it'd have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing.
-- Rosa Montero

#Reality #Thinking #Choices

The flesh is what traps us, because no one has ever chosen his or her body to live in, has he? It's the flesh that makes us sick, that makes us old and that eventually ends up killing us. But at the same time, it's that glorious flesh that enables us to scratch heaven through sensuality, through passion. Paradoxically, the flesh that kills us will also make us feel eternal for a brief moment because that's what we are in passion, eternal - we abandon ourselves, we give ourselves to the other, so much that when we are loving passionately, death doesn't exist.
-- Rosa Montero

#Passion #Giving #Sick

Reality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery. And in fact, when I remember something that has happened to me a long time ago, let's say twenty years ago, many times I'm not sure if I have actually lived what I am recalling, or I have dreamed about it, or I have written about it, or I have imagined it all.
-- Rosa Montero

#Reality #Long #Remember

The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don't know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest.
-- Rosa Montero

#Reading #Tree #Trying

The art path leads you to be increasingly free. And what does "because of being increasingly free" mean? Julio Ramón Ribeyro used to say a mature novel demands the author's death, not literal death but metaphoric death, which is the author has to truly erase himself. Therefore, to be truly free, you have to break free from internal and external pressures, to erase the self completely and become a sort of medium, let the story pass through yourself and let the story dance with you.
-- Rosa Montero

#Art #Mean #Path

How long does getting thin take?

Krishnamacharya's personal practice was always with long deep breathing and mental focus. Observe the position of his head, the lower abdomen and his mental focus. He was always concentrated on the inner alignment through breath.

The greatest problem about old age is the fear that it may go on too long.

The Baptists' basic theology is that if you hold someone under water long enough, he'll come around to your way of thinking. It's a ritual known as 'Bobbing for Baptists.'

You always have to make positive choices as an actor, even when you're playing someone who may not be doing the best things.

We have to always hope in humanity that people will make the right choices.

Friendship is the positive and unalterable choice of a person whom we have singled out for qualitites that we admire.

I was born in the Bronx, and then my father moved us to the country at an early age.

By the time I'm 40, interplanetary travel will be common. Nobody will want to talk to me at that age, anyway.

The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.