Enrique Vila-Matas Quotes

I don't like ferocious irony but rather the kind that vacillates between disappointment and hope. Okay?

I was full of doubts, of course, not a particularly bad way to be, but I didn't know that. Doubting so much made me suffer, but I could have saved myself the anxiety and simply doubted, without any problem. I was unaware that to doubt is to write. Marguerite Duras would say so in 1995, toward the end of her days: I can say what I like, but I shall never know why people write and how it is people don't write. In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing.

I think I have the right to be able to see myself differently from how others see me, to see myself however I want and not to be forced to be this person other people have decided I am.

As I write, I control my anxiety and anguish thanks to the invaluable aid of irony and humor. But every night I am subdued by an anxiety that knows no irony, and I must wait until the next day to rediscover the blend of anguish and humor that characterizes my writing and that generates my style.

The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn't suit a novelist in action, when he's in the course of writing his novel.

When it grows dark, we always need someone. This thought, the product of anxiety, only comes to me in the evenings, just when I'm about to end my writerly explorations.