Life & Wisdom Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig’s line is a neat reversal of the macho myth of self-knowledge as something you dig up alone, in private, like buried treasure. For him, the route inward runs through narrative, through the messy, secondhand, crowd-pleasing machinery of plot. “Felt the need” lands like compulsion rather than hobby: storytelling isn’t an aesthetic preference so much as an instrument for survival, a way to assemble a self that otherwise won’t hold.

The subtext is Puig’s signature: identity is never “pure,” never pristinely authentic. It’s mediated - by movies, gossip, melodrama, pop songs, the scripts we borrow from whatever culture hands us. Coming from an Argentine novelist who built major work (Heartbreak Tango, Kiss of the Spider Woman) out of letters, dialogue, hearsay, and cinematic tropes, the statement doubles as an artistic manifesto. You don’t confess; you collage. You don’t report an inner truth; you stage it, test it, watch how it plays when another voice speaks it back.

Context matters: Puig wrote under the shadow of Latin American machismo, censorship, and state violence, and lived much of his life in exile. In that climate, “understanding myself” isn’t soft self-help; it’s a political act with costs. Story becomes camouflage and candor at once. By filtering desire and fear through genre - romance, thriller, soap opera - Puig turns what’s dismissed as “trash” into a serious technology of selfhood: the only language capacious enough to hold what society insists should stay unsaid.