Making money isn't hard in itself... What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting one's life to.

that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive.

The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

We all give up great expectations along the way.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

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 had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those things were born with that novel.