Things are always best seen when they are a trifle mixed-up, a trifle disordered; the chilly administrative neatness of museums and filing cases, of statistics and cementeries, is an inhuman and antinatural kind of order; it is, in a word, disorder. True order belongs to Nature, which never yet has produced two identical trees or mountains or horses. When debts are not paid because they cannot be paid, the best thing to do is not talk about them, and shuffle the cards again. It is not difficult to write in Spanish; the Spanish language is a gift from the gods which we Spaniards take for granted. I take comfort therefore in the belief that you wished to pay tribute to a glorious language and not to the humble writer who uses it for everything it can express: the joy and the wisdom of Mankind, since literature is an art form of all and for all, although written without deference, heeding only the voiceless, anonymous murmur of a given place and time. The greatest reward is to know that one can speak and emit articulate sounds and utter words that describe things, events and emotions. I write from solitude and I speak from solitude...However I did not seek solitude. I found it. And from my solitude I think, work, and live - and I believe that I write and speak with almost infinite composure and resignation. In my solitude I constantly keep in mind the principle expounded by Picasso, another old friend and mentor, that no lasting work of art can be achieved without great solitude. For a rich and intensive prose, which with restrained compassion forms a challenging vision of man's vulnerability. Ideas? My head is full of them, one after the other, but they serve no purpose there. They must be put down on paper, one after the other. Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives. There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it. | 
