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

Sometimes, in difficult circumstances, one can confuse compassion with love.

Truth is, only the useless get to the top in this country.

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.