“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,

I feel like listening is a huge part of life – not only listening to people, but listening to people that you believe in, people who you think are wise.

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

I think there’s too many rules in golf. And I mean that’s easy to say for a player, but putting together a rule book is a tough thing in this game because there are so many different parts of the game.

There’s a lot there to enlarge you. That’s part of the value of being in an extended family is that it enlarges you. It makes you bigger. It makes you more.

The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one’s opinion but rather to know it.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

I’ve been through all the bad parts of the streets.