I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.