Javier Marías Quotes

Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

Illusions are important. What you foresee or what you remember can be as important as what really happens.

It's so sad that no one writes down the things we go through, and even worse - no one will ever know about it, no one will ever see or hear about it, no one will ever be able to restore.

One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.

Not to gain time, but maybe to lose it, to see it pass.

Fiction has the ability to show us what we don’t know and what doesn’t happen.

We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.

an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.

We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.

Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.