Sudden Death

But the only real things in a novel are the sequences of letters, words and sentences that make it up, and the paper on which they're printed. What they produce in a reader's head are private and unique landscapes of objects in motion that have only one thing in common: they don't exist.

These facts were confusing in their own time, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be confusing in a novel that doesn’t aspire to accurately represent that time, but does want to present it as a theory about the world we live in today.

Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.

El resto de la América infinita todavía ni siquiera sospechaba que en los siguientes doscientos años decenas de culturas milenarias que habían florecido aisladas y sin contaminantes ni defensas se iría inexorablemente a la mierda. No que importe: nada importa. Se extinguen las especies, los hijos se van de casa, los amigos consiguen novias intratables, las culturas desaparecen, las lenguas, un día, se dejan de hablar; los que sobreviven se convencen de que eran los más aptos

It isn't a book about Caravaggio or Quevedo, though Caravaggio and Quevedo are in the book, as are Cortés and Cuauhtémoc, and Galileo and Pius IV. Gigantic individuals facing off. All fucking, getting drunk, gambling in the void. Novels demolish monuments because all novels, even the most chaste, are a tiny bit pornographic.

When something is clear to a writer, I think it’s fair to ask him not to obscure it, but when something is unclear I think it should be left that way. The honest thing is to relay my doubts, and let the conversation move one step forward: the readers may know better.

I'm not sure that my friend's father liked my book. In an attempt to save me from my own imagination, he wrote me a six-page letter pointing out all the physical impossibilities and imaginary rules I had come up with to be able to say whatever the book says. The letter proves that the true art is reading, not writing, and it is a beautiful testament of loyalty: a friend of his son's is a friend of his. Commenting on some sexual incidents described in the novel, he noted: Now I know why you and my son are friends." This is a statement of complicity. It tells me that if we knew each other, he would forgive my defects just as he does his son's.

We Mexicans aren’t descendants of the Mexicas, but of the nations that joined with Cortés to overthrow them. We’re a country whose name is the product of nostalgia and guilt.

Nor was the professor especially particular in the exercise of his sexuality: he believed that in terms of texture and pressure there was little difference between the cunt of a sheep and the ass of the greatest artist of all time, so he might as well fuck him in the name of scientific experimentation.

Take, for example, an inexplicable organization called the Mexican National Front, consisting of thirty-two skinheads. The thirty-two morons who belong to the Front are admirers of Hitler—and even they explain on their website that Cortés was a bastard.

The question here is the responsibility I bear in the face of the reasonable fear that what is being said won’t be understood. The risk is worth the weight of that responsibility. The sole duty of a writer is to minister to his readers: to liberate them from inexactitude out of respect for the mysterious and touching pact of loyalty that they make with books. But the problem is that I don’t always know why name changes are significant in Mexico, and my hunch is that there is a whole history and politics behind it. When something is clear to a writer, I think it’s fair to ask him not to obscure it, but when something is unclear I think it should be left that way. The honest thing is to relay my doubts, and let the conversation move one step forward: the readers may know better.

Ya no era cosa de vida o muerte, sino de victoria y derrota--valores mucho más complejos y duros de llevar porque el que pierde un duelo a espada no tiene que vivir con ello.

La descripción de una obra de arte, como la de un sueño, detiene y vuelve decrépito un relato. Una obra de arte sólo sería contable si modificara la raya que va dibujando la Historia, y si una obra de arte, como un sueño, vale la pena ser recordada, es precisamente porque representa un sitio ciego para la Historia. El arte y los sueños no nos acompañan porque tengan la capacidad de mover cosas, sino porque detienen el mundo: funcionan como un paréntesis, un dique, la salud.