For someone like you who's a British citizen this might seem strange. How can you ban a language? It turns out that you can. During the dictatorship ….

I think that's true of real life - we don't ever know anyone completely. Secrets are very important to creating a narrative work that's believable. T….

Each year, in this world, several languages do die out. There are certain languages that have their survival assured for many years, such as English,….

What I strive to do is make my characters seem like real people so that the reader experiences them as people - that's something I've been working on….

The essence of a novelist is to invent things and speak the truth, at the same time..

The reader has information about the characters that the characters themselves don't have. We all have our secret sides. Even I come to understand th….

I take all my characters very seriously - the main, secondary, and supporting characters. Even if they only appear once, they still need to have thei….

I read a lot of poetry. All types of poetry, but mostly Catalan poetry, because I believe poetry is the essence of language. Reading the classics, be….

Research is necessary. However, you need to make sure you don't fall into its trap. You need to have time left for writing. To avoid the trap, I just….

There were many books in my parents' home. I'm from a family of five children and we were all readers. And so by the time I left home, I had already ….

I'm interested in how memory and power come together in evil. These are obsessions of mine that appear throughout, like the theme of music. I know at….

I'm always reading, and you learn a lot by reading. When I was twenty-five, I read a lot, but didn't have much reading behind me..

Along the way, about certain things, you realize, "I don't know anything about this." You think, "Is this going to sound ridiculous?" So I pestered m….

Everywhere you go you find readers who are interested, even though the story takes place here in this very neighborhood. It doesn't matter that it ta….