A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.

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

If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.

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.

Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.

In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.

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.