The air seemed poisoned with fear and hatred. People eyed on another suspiciously, and the streets smelled of a silence that knotted your stomach.

Death does that: it makes everyone feel sentimental. When we stand in front of a coffin, we all see only what is good or what we want to see.

I hoped my absence made them happy or at least made them forget that they weren't happy and never will be.

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

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.

After a while it occurred to me that between the covers of each of those books lay a boundless universe waiting to be discovered while beyond those walls, in the outside world, people allowed life to pass by in afternoons of football and radio soaps, content to do little more than gaze at their navels.

Never trust anyone, Daniel, especially the people you admire. Those are the ones who will make you suffer the worst blows.