Julio Cortázar: [...] Strangely enough, my earliest memories give an image of differentiation. A kind of suspicion that if I did not explore reality from the perspective of language, from that semantic dimension, reality for me was not complete, it did not satisfy me. Furthermore - this a little later, when I was eight or nine years old - a period began that could be dangerous and lead me to madness; it was the time when words began to have the same or even greater value than the things themselves.
Omar Prego: A kind of substitution of reality...
Julio Cortázar: The enchantment that words exerted on me. There were words that I liked, some that I did not like, others that had a certain shape, a certain color. One of the memories of my childhood is writing words with my finger on the wall when I was sick [...]. I stretched my finger and wrote words, I saw them take shape in space. Many of them were already fetishes, magical words.
Since then, this condition has followed me.