The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.

And with each day that passed, the gulf broadened and my isolation became more accentuated. In such a situation, the discovery that my experience was not unique, that it had also been that of other Spanish intellectuals, became very important for me.

As I began to discover my own truth and endeavored to possess it with CLARITY, I became more and more alienated from that which my companions held, or professed to hold.

Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.

In Count Julian I simply proposed to create a text which would allow for diverse levels of reading.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile.