It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

When you have a child, the world has a hostage.

He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.