. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.

Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.

Blessed be the night, which conceals and protects things fair and foul with the same indifferent mantle.

The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.