Enrique Vila-Matas Quotes & Sayings

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. — Enrique Vila-Matas

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn't deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies ... Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. — Enrique Vila-Matas

I long to journey endlessly, always in search of something new. Always alert. — Enrique Vila-Matas

Had I mentioned to someone around 1795 that I planned to write, anyone with any sense would have told me to write for two hours every day, with or without inspiration. Their advice would have enabled me to benefit from the ten years of my life I totally wasted waiting for inspiration. — Enrique Vila-Matas

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. — Enrique Vila-Matas

After all, what are we, what is any one of us, if not a combination, particular and exact, of what we have done, what we have read, and what we have imagined? — Enrique Vila-Matas

To miniaturize is also to conceal. — Enrique Vila-Matas

It's an honor, indeed I'm glad, to join in giving a warm reception to a book that has given me many delightful moments. — Enrique Vila-Matas

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. — Enrique Vila-Matas

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. — Enrique Vila-Matas

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. — Enrique Vila-Matas

He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room. — Enrique Vila-Matas

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