"My pleasure was to copy, not to create"
About this Quote
A writer confessing, almost with a smirk, that his deepest pleasure was imitation is a quiet provocation in a culture that fetishizes originality. Manuel Puig is staking a claim for secondhand art: the copy as a deliberate aesthetic, not a failure of imagination. It lands like a rebuttal to the modernist posture of the lone genius. Puig, who built novels out of overheard talk, melodrama, pop songs, movie plots, and gossip’s circuitry, is pointing to a different engine of invention: montage.
The intent feels double-edged. On the surface, it’s self-effacing, a disarming move that dodges the pomp of “I create worlds.” Underneath, it’s a manifesto. Copying becomes a method of reading culture so closely that you can reproduce its tics, its desires, its cheap thrills, and then let their contradictions show. Puig’s work (think of the way Kiss of the Spider Woman braids political terror with escapist cinema) treats mass culture not as guilty pleasure but as a language people use to survive. Copying is how you honor that language without pretending you’re above it.
Context matters: Latin American literary prestige in Puig’s era often leaned toward grand allegory and high style. Puig’s embrace of soap opera and Hollywood is an affront and a love letter. The subtext is that originality is overrated; what’s truly radical is admitting that our inner lives are already compiled from borrowed scenes, and writing that compilation with precision.
The intent feels double-edged. On the surface, it’s self-effacing, a disarming move that dodges the pomp of “I create worlds.” Underneath, it’s a manifesto. Copying becomes a method of reading culture so closely that you can reproduce its tics, its desires, its cheap thrills, and then let their contradictions show. Puig’s work (think of the way Kiss of the Spider Woman braids political terror with escapist cinema) treats mass culture not as guilty pleasure but as a language people use to survive. Copying is how you honor that language without pretending you’re above it.
Context matters: Latin American literary prestige in Puig’s era often leaned toward grand allegory and high style. Puig’s embrace of soap opera and Hollywood is an affront and a love letter. The subtext is that originality is overrated; what’s truly radical is admitting that our inner lives are already compiled from borrowed scenes, and writing that compilation with precision.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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