Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.

We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.

In the books by Ruy-Sanchez we find again the erotic conviction that allows us to read with all the skin. The erotic, in his narratives is not a subject or a phrase, it is the clay of what they are made. In his novels every experience, trivial or extraordinary, breaths through the erotic.

If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.

Without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garca Mrquez and Julio Cortzar. . . . Leskov is the essential storyteller: he does not portray life, he creates it in all its wonder and terror and magic.

A writer stops writing the moment he or she puts the last full stop to their text, and at that point the book is in limbo and doesn't come to life until the reader picks it up and the reader flips the pages.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.