The Labyrinth of the Spirits

“One writes for oneself, and one rewrites for others.”

“People die, especially those who would do better to stay alive. Perhaps it’s because God needs to make room for the huge amount of jerks with which he enjoys peppering the world.”

Every day I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as “inspiration” or “having something to tell” and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative, with the painting of textures, with the timbres and colors of the staging, with the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas.

David Martín was a solitary man, who burned his bridges with the world without realizing it, or perhaps he did it deliberately because he thought that nothing good would ever come across them.

I enjoyed two childhoods: the first was quite conventional, if such a thing can ever be, and was the one others saw; the second was an imaginary childhood, and the one I truly lived. I made some good friends, most of them books.

Like many men, by then my father was beginning to suspect that he’d stopped being a young man, and he often revisited the scenes of his early youth, looking for answers to questions he still didn’t fully understand

“What Fermín says is that wise men own up when they sometimes make mistakes, but idiots always make mistakes, even though they never admit it and always think they’re right. He calls it his Archimedean Principle of Communicable Imbecilities.”

A story is, after all, a conversation between the narrator and the reader, and just as narrators can only relate as far as their ability will permit, so too readers can only read as far as what is already written in their souls.
This is the golden rule that sustains every artifice of paper and ink. Because when the lights go out, when the music ends and the stalls are empty again, the only thing that matters is the mirage that has been engraved in the theater of the imagination all readers hold in their mind.

You’re only free up to the point where you ignore the truth.”

Sometimes, when the gods aren’t looking and destiny loses its way, even good people get a taste of good luck in their lives.