If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time.
Category Archive: Octavio Paz
Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. A constant coming and going: wisdom lies in the momentary.
The presence and the present of America are a future; our continent is, by its nature, the land which does not exist on its own, but as something which is created and invented.
Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.
The idea of modernity is beginning to lose its vitality. It is losing it because modernity is no longer a critical attitude but an accepted, codified convention.
The Mexican succumbs very easily to sentimental effusions, and therefore he shuns them.
Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?
I think we all have our own personality, unique and distinctive, and at the same time, I think that our own unique and distinctive personality blends with the wind, with the footsteps in the street, with the noises around the corner, and with the silence of memory, which is the great producer of ghosts.
The sound of water is worth more than all the poets’ words.
All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.