Art & Creativity Quote by Manuel Puig

There is a quiet provocation in Puig's seemingly polite confession: the writer as service worker, not priest. "Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader" rejects the sacred solitude of high-literary mythmaking. It's a line that flattens the hierarchy between author and audience, and in doing so, it hints at Puig's real subject: power. Who gets to be addressed, who gets to be included, who gets to feel intelligent without being punished for it.

Puig came up in a Latin American literary moment dominated by the Boom's swaggering formal ambition and, often, its macho authorial presence. His novels moved differently: collage, gossip, Hollywood fantasy, melodrama, voices overheard rather than declared. Thinking of "the reader" isn't just generosity; it's strategy. He builds books the way mass culture builds intimacy, pulling you in through recognizable forms (letters, dialogue, popular genres) and then smuggling in the hard stuff: queerness, repression, desire as a political problem.

The subtext is also defensive, almost cunning. To announce loyalty to the reader is to preempt the gatekeepers who equate difficulty with value. Puig implies that accessibility can be an aesthetic principle, not a compromise. He's aligning himself with pleasure and legibility, yet insisting those aren't the enemies of seriousness. In his hands, reader-consciousness becomes a kind of ethics: attention to how people actually consume stories, how they talk, how they dream. The line reads like craft advice, but it's really a manifesto against elitism - and for a literature that trusts its audience enough to meet them where they already live.