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.

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 things about the characters only through the writing process, as I am going along.

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 throw myself into the abyss while at the same time being aware that if I'm dealing with information I don't know enough about, I have to go to someone and talk about it.

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 some point or another one of my obsessions will emerge. You don't know how much I save in psychiatrist bills with this writing!

I take all my characters very seriously - the main, secondary, and supporting characters. Even if they only appear once, they still need to have their own life. Some characters are absent literally but at the same time very, very present.

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 it was illegal to speak Catalan. This is an experience that we Catalans have all had to varying extents. Some more tense than others, but it's something we all share.

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