For someone like you who's a British citizen this might seem strange. How can you ban a language? It turns out that you can. During the dictatorship it was illegal to speak Catalan. This is an experience that we Catalans have all had to varying extents. Some more tense than others, but it's something we all share.
Jaume CabreWhat I strive to do is make my characters seem like real people so that the reader experiences them as people - that's something I've been working on all of my life. I couldn't have written this novel at twenty or thirty, for technical reasons - I didn't have the technique then - but above all because I didn't have the life experiences I have now at sixty-seven.
Jaume CabreI read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be they medieval or contemporary, gives me a stylistic energy that I'm very interested in.
Jaume CabreThere were many books in my parents' home. I'm from a family of five children and we were all readers. And so by the time I left home, I had already read many books, and I was very interested in reading more. That was when I started to have the desire to write. But it wasn't like a divine apparition with angels and seraphins on high. Not for me, at least.
Jaume CabreI take all my characters very seriously - the main, secondary, and supporting characters. Even if they only appear once, they still need to have their own life. Some characters are absent literally but at the same time very, very present.
Jaume CabreResearch is necessary. However, you need to make sure you don't fall into its trap. You need to have time left for writing. To avoid the trap, I just throw myself into the abyss while at the same time being aware that if I'm dealing with information I don't know enough about, I have to go to someone and talk about it.
Jaume Cabre