When I write now I do not invent situation, characters, or actions, but rather structures and discursive forms, textual groupings which are combined according to secret affinities among themselves, as in architecture or the plastic arts.

But the Spain which emerged around 1960, beginning with its economic miracle, created by the invasion of tourists, can no longer result in impassioned dedication on the part of its intellectuals, and even less on the part of foreign intellectuals.

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

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

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.

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.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.