Angélica Gorodischer Quotes

Writing and translating are part of the same miracle that is language—that which made us human.

As Borges, the Master, said: “When I heard Funes speak, then I had the story.” One has to let the character speak.

People are the same everywhere, in Buenos Aires, in Ulan Bator, in Paris, in Roldán, in Toronto, etc. People always want the same things, to have food, a house, warmth in the winter, cool in the summer, to go to the movies on Saturdays, to go on vacation . . . and to be told stories. To listen to stories is a basic necessity. And everything is a big story: journalism, television, radio, religion, film, everything. We are all readers, active or potential. “Tell me a story,” the reader says. “I am going to tell you a story,” says the author, “but you have to believe me.” “I will believe you,” says the reader. And thus, on the basis of this agreement, those of us who write set ourselves to tell a story. Which can be a novel, or theater, poetry, but that will always be a story. And so we fulfill one of people’s basic needs. As important as food and shelter.

I am not an academic, nor a teacher, nor a B.A., nor a doctor, nothing. I am a writer of narrative and that’s how I hope and like to be thought of...I am not a writer of science fiction. I am a writer and that is how I want to be thought of.

Inspiration doesn’t exist; what exists is work. As someone said: “Inspiration arrived . . . and found me working.” There is no other way.

when I abandoned SF, I didn’t abandon Balzac or Borges or Cervantes, but I added the people that interest me: the women, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, Asa Larsson, Fred Vargas, Clarice Lispector, and so forth, plus feminist theorists. I no longer read SF. I look around to see what’s new and I keep to what interests me: science (astrophysics and paleoanthropology above all), women’s politics.