All true stories begin and end in a cemetery" - The Shadow of the Wind

I think you judge yourself too severely, a quality that always distinguishes people of true worth.

Maturity is simply the process of discovering that everything you believed in when you were young is false and that all the things you refused to believe in turn out to be true.

It is difficult to hate an idea. That requires a certain intellectual discipline and a slightly obsessive, sick mind. There aren’t too many of those. It’s much easier to hate someone with a recognizable face whom we can blame for everything that makes us feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t have to be an individual character. It could be a nation, a race, a group. . .anything.

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

But in good time you'll see that sometimes what matters isn't what one gives but what one gives up.