I've always thought that we are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.
From Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I spend a lot of time in L.A., and when it rains there you get the entire rainfall for the year in two days, raindrops the size of mangoes. And in Barcelona, the Mediterranean storms come up from the sea, thunder and lightning; it's like the end of the world.
I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.
I've always ignored the labels people put on things.
I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.
Barcelona is a very old city in which you can feel the weight of history; it is haunted by history. You cannot walk around it without perceiving it.
I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.
In Los Angeles you get the sense sometimes that there's a mysterious patrol at night: when the streets are empty and everyone's asleep, they go erasing the past. It's like a bad Ray Bradbury story - 'The Memory Erasers'.
The haunting of history is ever present in Barcelona. I see cities as organisms, as living creatures. To me, Madrid is a man and Barcelona is a woman. And it's a woman who's extremely vain.
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