“Our senses are always part of the process.”

When I use the term “complex realism”, what I’m suggesting is that the writer must be realist, always realist, but not realist in the sense we have usually used the term in literature.

This complexity is what creates that which we all know – the World – is connected in a system of networks – and I’m not referring only to the internet but also to thousands of analog networks in which we are all immersed at every instant.

Everything reaches us filtered through culture.

Today we understand that reality corresponds to a model – or, even better, the sum of various models – which in science are termed “complex systems” – not complicated or difficult, that’s a different thing!

I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

In fact, many of the quotes in my books are quotes which were translated from English and that I read already translated into Spanish.

I’m not really concerned with what the original version in English was, because the important thing for me is that I received them already translated, and they’ve influenced my original worldview as translations, not as original quotations.

If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can’t keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago.

I can play with that opportunity or not. This is my right, or poetic license, as someone who is building an artefact of fantasy – this implicit pact with the reader is my starting point.

If there’s one thing that can save the novel, it is to make it independent of cinema, to narrate in a way that cinema can never narrate, using to its benefit those particular characteristics which belong to writing.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely.

I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new text.

For me, every translation is a new book, with the translator inevitably broadening the meaning of the original book in any translation.

I never enquire into the origin of things, all Origin is a fallacy (in this I follow Nietzsche: origin is a very contested Cartesian illusion of reliability).

Not even I, in my original Spanish, am necessarily obliged to make exact quotations. I can do that or not,

We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.

Part of your mission in life then must be to share your gifts with as many people as possible. That means being willing to play big.

The reason why I wanted to direct is because there are personal stories that I want to tell, but also because I love every part of movie making – from the wardrobe to the set decoration to cinematography.

I didn’t become a Tory just to become part of a managerial group who wanted to run the country…

My mom would have different fragrances for different times of the year. They were a part of her identity.

The worst part of being gay in the twentieth century is all that damn disco music to which one has to listen.

The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.

Your illusions are a part of you like your bones and flesh and memory.