As much as I love movies, it would be presumptuous of me to think that I know how to make one.

I went about the job in a direct way. I took the hatchet in both my hands and vigorously beat the fish on the head with the hammerhead (I still didn’t have the stomach to use the sharp edge). The dorado did the most extraordinary thing as it died: it began to flash all kinds of colours in rapid succession. Blue, green, red, gold, and violet flickered and shimmered neon-like on its surface as it struggled. I felt I was beating a rainbow to death.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

I did not count the days or the weeks or the months. Time is an illusion that only makes us pant. I survived because I forgot even the very notion of time.

I preferred to set off and perish in search of my own kind than to live a lonely half-life of physical comfort and spiritual death on this murderous island.

There's nothing like the unimaginable to make people believe.

As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound.