It's not that you get a cliché and then wiggle it about or use synonyms. You don't take an ordinary decorative paragraph and give it style. What you're trying to do is be faithful to your perceptions and transmit them as faithfully as you can. I say these sentences until they sound right. There's no objective reason why they're right. They just sound right to me.

The universe is a million billion light-years wide, and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. This is the position of the universe with regards to human life.

No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

Laughter always forgives.

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.

My 12-year-old daughter said to me, "Enough with the subtitles, Daddy, for crying out loud." Because they always seem to cloud the issue rather than clarify it.

My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.