For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me - I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired - it is something essential and structural. It's like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don't know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words.
Rosa MonteroFor me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me - I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired - it is something essential and structural. It's like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don't know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words.
Rosa MonteroOne of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us and you can't shake it off, since it was so easy, it'd have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing.
Rosa MonteroThe flesh is what traps us, because no one has ever chosen his or her body to live in, has he? It's the flesh that makes us sick, that makes us old and that eventually ends up killing us. But at the same time, it's that glorious flesh that enables us to scratch heaven through sensuality, through passion. Paradoxically, the flesh that kills us will also make us feel eternal for a brief moment because that's what we are in passion, eternal - we abandon ourselves, we give ourselves to the other, so much that when we are loving passionately, death doesn't exist.
Rosa MonteroReality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery. And in fact, when I remember something that has happened to me a long time ago, let's say twenty years ago, many times I'm not sure if I have actually lived what I am recalling, or I have dreamed about it, or I have written about it, or I have imagined it all.
Rosa MonteroAt any given time, if you live long enough, old age catches you . . . the only choices we have in life are either the impairment of old age or early death.
Rosa MonteroThe more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don't know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest.
Rosa Montero