I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwords I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.

A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality.

That book taught me that by reading, I could live more intensely. It could give me back the sight I had lost. For that reason alone, a book that didn't matter to anyone changed my life.

I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms come up from the sea, thunder and lightning; its like the end of the world.

I tried to swallow his nonsense without choking.