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

He (Intellectuals) claims that label to compensate for his own inadequacies. It's as old as that saying: tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as excessively devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant and the feeble-minded as intellectual.

None of us are what we once were.

Sometimes we think people are like lottery tickets, that they're there to make our most absurd dreams come true.

The truth is what hurts

Martin, at my age, eroticism is reduced to enjoying caramel custard and looking at widows' necks.' - Senor Sempere.

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.