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Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

"All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy"

About this Quote

Puig is smuggling a defense of excess into what sounds like a confession. The line insists that “complicated” isn’t a glamorous adjective or a coy pose; it’s a formal problem. If your inner life arrives as contradictions, digressions, backstory, and unresolved desire, a short story’s clean arc can feel like a lie. A movie, with its hunger for visible action and decisive closure, can be another kind of betrayal. The novel, by contrast, is the one container roomy enough to let mess stay messy and still be legible.

The subtext is craft as self-treatment, but not in the soft-focus way people talk about “healing.” Puig’s “personal therapy” is a working method: the page becomes a controlled space where the author can stage shame, obsession, nostalgia, and fantasy without having to tidy them into a moral. That’s especially resonant given Puig’s signature approach - melodrama, popular culture, gossip, letters, and dialogue - the very stuff literary gatekeepers used to dismiss as “not serious.” He flips that hierarchy. The so-called trash of everyday feeling is exactly where the serious material lives.

Context matters: Puig wrote from the pressures of mid-century Argentina, censorship, exile, and queer life lived under surveillance. For writers in that orbit, the novel isn’t just longer; it’s safer and more subversive, a way to encode what can’t be said directly. Calling it therapy is both honest and tactical: it reframes the novel not as prestige, but as necessity.

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APA Style (7th ed.)
Puig, Manuel. (2026, January 16). All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/all-of-my-problems-are-rather-complicated-i-100152/

Chicago Style
Puig, Manuel. "All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/all-of-my-problems-are-rather-complicated-i-100152/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"All of my problems are rather complicated - I need an entire novel to deal with them, not a short story or a movie. It's like a personal therapy." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/all-of-my-problems-are-rather-complicated-i-100152/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Manuel Puig

Manuel Puig (December 28, 1932 - July 22, 1990) was a Author from Argentina.

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