“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!

Our senses are always part of the process.

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,

In time of difficulties, we must not lose sight of our achievements.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

Cats on the bandstand, give them each a big hand, anyone who sweats like that must be all right.

Without publicity there can be no public support, and without public support every nation must decay.

Everything is traditionally slow – much faster than it ever has been on earth but still far, far too slow.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.