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Picasso said, 'Art is a lie that tells the truth.' What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

I used to dream about Gorbachev before he lost power. I'd go into a panic because I was meeting him, and I had nothing to wear. I'd ask my brother what to do, and he'd tell me to wear my dressing gown. I'd tell him I can't - it's too horrible. He'd tell me to wear his as well. So I'd meet Gorbachev wearing two dressing gowns.

If I could meet Quentin Tarantino, I don't know if I'd just ask him one question. I'd probably milk it into, like, 500 questions.

I don't think that I'm over his influence but they probably don't look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

Picasso is a character that has pursued me for a long time and I always rejected. He deserves a lot of respect because I am from Malaga, and I was born four blocks from where he was born.