Ana María Shua Quotes

The flash fiction genre allows me to concentrate the maximum possible meaning in the minimum possible signifier, and I love this. It has strong links with poetry and it is narrative at the same time. It has everything in such a short length! It is a great pleasure for me to transform an idea —a stone, say— into a brilliant gem in a single day. And if everything fails, if the stone cannot be made into a jewel, I can throw it away in a few hours, instead of suffering for years as happens with writing a novel. Today’s poetry is too mysterious for me. It is too hermetic. At times my flash fictions can seem difficult to read, but they always provide the necessary keys to unlock their respective meanings.

Ethics and aesthetics are just the same in art; or at least they are integrated in a complex way.

I love to play with words and meanings and to make somersaults with them. In the encounter with my fictions, I would like my readers to experience more than just reflection. I would hope they trigger in the readers their own capacity to imagine and play with all the possibilities of language.

I try to catch pieces from the chaos of reality and shape them in the small and fake and necessary cosmos of fiction.

Savage capitalism and globalization finished in the 1990s what dictatorship started in the 1970s. State policy favored big business that sought to seize the local markets.

Variety is my device. Each of my texts must startle the reader one way or another. I think that is one of the tasks literature must accomplish: to never let the reader feel really confortable.

it doesn’t matter how short a short story is, it must contain a happening in time that alters the state of things. This is the only way to tell a story.

A good translation must bring to the reader not only the meaning of the text, but also to its music —its rhythms.

I was proud of our cultural level in Argentina. It was our way of breathing and resistance and suddenly we were forced to avoid reality by choosing every word with concern.

What is literature? How can you explain it? Why do writers write? Why do readers read? It is not enough to know. We want to understand. If knowing and knowledge were our main and only concern, art would have never come to exist. We would have science and maybe journalism… But we are not satisfied with simple information about what happened. We need more than an anecdote. We need a story that gives shape and meaning to the confusing chaos of life. Our minds need an order that does not exist in real life.