Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig frames authorship not as ambition but as fate, and that posture is doing more work than it first admits. “I didn’t choose” is a refusal of the tidy career narrative: the respectable writer who carefully opts into the canon. Instead, he flips agency onto “literature,” turning the art form into an active force that recruits, claims, even kidnaps. It’s a romantic line on the surface, but it also reads like self-defense: if literature chose him, then his stylistic sins against high seriousness - melodrama, pop culture, gossip, Hollywood montage, the sentimental charge of genre - aren’t indulgences. They’re inevitabilities.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “There was no decision on my side” suggests compulsion, but also absolution. Puig, an Argentine novelist who built serious work out of “unserious” materials, spent his career irritating gatekeepers who wanted literature to look like Literature: masculine, austere, national, properly tragic. By denying choice, he denies the premise that he should have chosen differently. Taste becomes destiny.

Context matters: Puig wrote under political pressure and cultural policing, and he lived much of his life in exile. In that light, “no decision” can sound like a way of describing how art becomes the only livable language when institutions, norms, or regimes narrow the space to speak. The line flatters literature, yes, but it’s also a quiet provocation: if literature is big enough to “choose” a writer like Puig, then the canon has to expand or admit it’s just a club.