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.

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.

Our senses are always part of the process.

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

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

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 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.