One thing you can't help noticing in South America and in Latin culture, generally, is how nice people are. Although when I went back to Spain - my mother lived in Spain and both my brothers lived there - after the Uruguay trip, I thought, "Oh great, Hispanic people." But they weren't nearly as nice as the Uruguayans. They're quite proud and pissed off, the Spaniards.

Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit.

They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

America is a younger country than England, obviously, and as self-awareness is forming in America - are we a collection of immigrants, are we a load of Italians and Germans and Jews and Brits and Irish, or are we a country with a soul and an identity? - there was a subliminal sense, they knew that the writers would be the ones who would answer those questions.

Envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy; it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism.