Quotes from Antonio Munoz Molina

Money makes people bold and cosmopolitan; if you are poor, you are naturally conservative. It's not easy to be a bohemian when you have to worry about what is going to happen with you and with your next paycheck.

A few British suffragettes everybody laughed at started the cause of equality between men and women.

Cervantes is the most important Spanish writer. But he is not the most representative of the Spanish. His irony, his sense of humor - they are too subtle to seem Spanish.

Shakespeare is a permanent presence in the English letters.

There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.

I have spent a great deal of my life being part of minorities. Some of the people I admire the most in the world have had the courage to defend, against wind and tide, minority viewpoints in those frightening times when any disagreement with universal conformity is identified as treason.

Si hay ciclista, no monta la bicicleta como si fuera una de esas maquinas brutales de los gimnasio, sino que se pasea demoradamente en ella, inclinado sobre el manillar, mirando a su alrededor, acompasado su pedaleo al ritmo apaciguado de las cosas.

Me sumerjo en un libro y durante dos o tres días no leo nada más y no lo dejo hasta que no lo he terminado. Soy consciente de estar dándome a mí mismo una educación.

por la que entra una luz clara y gris como la de los cuadros de Vermeer, en los que siempre hay habitaciones que protegen cálidamente de la intemperie a sus ensimismados habitantes y en las que algo les recuerda la amplitud

Un libro es una madriguera para no ser visto y una isla desierta en la que encontrarse a salvo y también un vehículo de huida.

Tantos años angustiado por la obsesión de terminar cuanto antes las cosas, de saltar de un minuto a otro como de un vagón a otro en un tren en marcha y ahora empieza a intuir que lo que le faltaba tal vez no era velocidad sino lentitud, paciencia y no confusa agitación.

A veces uno no se da cuenta de las cosas más obvias si alguien no le llama la atención sobre ellas.

Tal vez las cosas han de ser primero soñadas para fijarse en la memoria.

it disconcerts him not to be immune to the weakness that he finds so unpleasant in others.

The attraction of an exotic presence that was intensely carnal and at the same time as intangible as a promise was contained not in her attitude or words but in her very presence, the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes, the timbre of her voice, and something else not in her, the promise of so many unfulfilled and often unformed desires in him, roused by her proximity as if by a clap of hands or a voice revealing the dimension of a great area of darkness.

La biblioteca se hace igual con lo que se elige como con lo que queda descartado.

After so much time he was still searching as he had then, hoping for something he couldn't name but that corroded or undermined his stability of thought, not allowing him real rest, injecting doubt and suspicion into the evident satisfaction or everything he'd achieved

I knew very well I couldn't give you many things you desired, but then neither will any other woman because what you want doesn't exist and you don't know how to want what's closest to you.

But he didn't have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory

El alma de las personas no está en las fotografías sino en las cosas menudas que tocaron, las que tuvieron el calor de las palmas de sus manos. La noche de los tiempos

He'd forgotten the sensation of novely, the thrill of desiring a woman so intensely it was pure magnetism of her female presence that made him tremble, more than her physical beauty or the slightly exotic elegance of her dress or the spontaneity with which she had leaned on his arm, holding it tighter when a speeding care passed close to them

A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he'd never stopped being a stranger, an intruder.

Me he instalado en esta ciudad para esperar en ella el fin del mundo.

She looked around and wouldn't understand how she'd reached this point, by what sum of errors, as if after a long, difficult journey she found herself in the wrong station, her suitcases on the ground, the train she'd been on disappearing in the distance and no other in sight, and nobody in the station, not even an open clerk's window where she could consult timetables or buy another ticket.