Does ugliness produce a revitalising effect, a bit like death or perhaps like violence, as if ugliness were a visual violence?

What difference is there between ugliness and repugnance to ugliness?

Ugliness is always social, it doesn’t exist in nature. It may be that ugliness is a form of fear of the unknown.

And we all know that we carry an ugly monkey inside and that cosmetics only makes it more grotesque. And that, rather than dolling it up, we need to seduce it.

Is seduction of the enemy our last resort?

Electric chairs are ever more human, adverts ever more dreamlike, dreams themselves ever more reasonable, laws ever more barbaric.

For a thought to grow, it has to specialise. But then it’s no longer a thought, it’s reflection. A strand of thought has the charm of unpredictability; reflection, the bracing effect of a half-planned walk. You have to appreciate the god in everything.

Where does a nagging intuition end and error begin? They say that error can be an interesting dimension with hindsight. Undoubtedly, some intuitions are daughters of the devil.

Some worldviews are just convenient fictions to justify cowardice, wickedness, envy, insecurity.

Never try to organise an orgy when you have hiccups: it doesn’t work.

There is some hope in superficiality, as if things that are only slightly touched won’t break.

When you are in a foreign city and begin to feel its monotony, it’s another monotony, a foreign monotony.

Some people are crosswords with the wrong number of squares, inevitable misprints in the clues, the errata often late, the moment of discovery awry, but what is most unexpected is that inverted answers are questions.

Lying: there’s a kind of pleasure in lies, especially if it’s a whacking great big one like a flying pig. Why don’t we lie more often? Why this big obsession with the truth, or with what we think is the truth? But there’s also the illicit pleasure of the fib. Of course, the appearance of truth has a stabilising influence on reality.

Distrust any truth in marble. If it’s in marble, it means it’s a little dead, but sometimes things are neither of one kingdom nor of the other.

If everyone went on strike for humanity… for a return to the ideal of humanity. If the idea of humanity is a myth, a lie man told himself and he became dazed with such a fragrant lie, pretty as a cosmic illusion, it’s because there is something truthful in the utopian impulse.

It sounds good to say I’m amoral. But when you start messing people about as a side-effect of your philosophy, then you’re not only creating a worse world, you’re also perpetuating that contemporary ill, the death of affection.

Would an injection of spirituality make the world exist like an orange again? Has the world ever existed like that? What would be the right dose? And why an injection? Why not something less invasive? Perhaps something like a gentle breeze?

When you write using a fountain pen, the fresh ink glistens to start with and then it begins to slowly dry up until it turns matt. These are the details that give the world three-dimensionality.

What remains of a book? A sensation. Perhaps a few sentences. Perhaps an energy, a smile, the recollection of an itinerary. And sometimes nothing. And sometimes the suspicion your leg was being gently pulled.

It’s better not to reread some favourite authors, just in case.

Sometimes writing is an accident: sometimes texts emerge unscathed, perfect. Other times, texts emerge crippled, in a mess, covered in wounds, incurable: poor things.

We aspire to perfection: art, writing, must be an act of perfection. We should learn to love imperfection, our daily lot, such as toast burnt to a cinder. There is beauty in toast burnt to a cinder. The problem is that it’s not nutritious. And that a hierarchy of imperfection also exists.

Every work of fiction is an artifice: the fragment retains some trace of naturalness, something tiny, imperfect, unforced, human.

Though it may sometimes create a bit of confusion, to understand, to get into somebody else’s shoes, to write, it’s necessary to capture and cultivate in your own bones, sensations, emotions, states of mind, rarefied situations. Let’s say it creates an unforgettable trace. In any case, it’s always a task against time, and even creates useful ghosts.

The writer builds himself a puzzle in which he ends up feeling trapped. Whatever happens, it’s impossible to give up writing because the writer finds himself surrounded by pieces that he has to match. Besides, it’s a strange puzzle because it covers the span of a whole life.

To write slowly so as not to be consumed at once, so as to dissolve gradually.

The blind spot forms part of sight. Our sight is always partial, though it seems there are some sights more partial than others.

When it comes to it, you can only speak about your own experience, the neighbour’s experience is mere guesswork. Empathy gets closer to the facts than indifference. But empathy is not without dangers.

We accept sublimated madness in the arts. We only accept madness if it allows us a sidelong look, never in the face. Madness in real time is forbidden, a bit like nudity in public, which is only allowed in the art of museums and galleries.

The past has never existed. What exists is a convenient and up-to-date transformation and distortion of a spectre that returns with invitation or without it.

It’s not that love is anti-democratic, elitist, exclusive. It’s that fear gives it that twist.

There is a kind of anxiety in money. Money is at the same time cure and illness, prison and release, euphoria and recurring sorrow.

What difference is there between the useful and the useless before a neglected grave? And before a well-tended grave?

An English saying: stop stabbing yourself in the back.

Is the world an unresolved noir mystery and death the relaxing moment when the suspense is resolved?

It’s better to live life like a thriller than like a theorem.

Hardness of style always exudes a patina of fear.

Identification with politicians occurs at the level of incompetence. And yet with time it becomes a question of degree. It’s tiring to witness so much dexterity in error.

The greater the ambition, the greater the indifference to the reality of the other (unless he’s worth something to you).

And sometimes, in order to find yourself, you have to follow the right directions to get lost

Children come into the world with cruelty. This cruelty is tamed over time, until it forms a brain tumour that gradually settles in. The suppression of cruelty (instead of its integration into playing) leads to a subtle sadism that shapes the way things are. Rather than a vicious circle, a vicious square comes full circle.

Humanity can only put up with so much reality. That’s why it has invented magic, religion, art and karaoke.

A perfect love can never be defeated.

A kiss can turn into a luminous phenomenon. Those are the kisses we need (from time to time).

It’s also necessary to learn to speak in dreams and nightmares. With so much extraneous action, we tend to adopt a rather silent attitude.

We need to learn how to engage with a kamikaze will, to negotiate with it, to tame it so that it can carry on being.

The only ones without problems are the dead, so we shouldn’t complain.

Darkness always breeds more darkness. But just occasionally, you find an iridescence at the end of a darkness.

Advertising would be better (sometimes it’s like a visual poem) if it weren’t at the service of a totalitarian system.

That’s what our senses want when they’re not damaged by the climate, to indulge in intensity and stop fooling around.

To defend small trivialities may seem petty, but if you don’t start with the tiny, how are you going to progress to the big?

Inertia is not static, it’s not a rest. It’s a conveyor belt that takes you backwards, in the opposite direction, towards a bath of lukewarm water.

If language did not exist, how would we hide thoughts? Language is always double, triple, quadruple, unlimited, even insufficient.

The trouble with leaving things for the next reincarnation is that it’s full in no time.

Those who have been immortal several times say it’s been no help. You have to be immortal every time to gain a rough idea of the whole. However, the good thing about being immortal is that you can waste time infinitely.

Coherence is often confused with homogeneity. To be coherent, art should shoot in all directions.

When fragility, darkness and sadness converge in a chaotic ball, you’ve no choice but to swallow it with a gulp.

Creativeness is an attitude towards everything. Those who use it to create a work and neglect their life, lose out in the end. To live life in real time – it isn’t always possible, but as with everything you have to fight for it – is one of the best works to which we can aspire.

A word, the sound of a word, can connect us mysteriously with ecstasy’s neuronal circuit.

When someone is fuming, you have to put out the fire slowly.

We are here to cross the whole spectrum of colours: to be boys and girls, men and women, to explore unnamed states, to be animals and also objects. Also to be nothing. Otherwise we’ll have to keep coming back.

And sometimes, you can’t even trust dreams.

The structures of thought, of living life in a certain way, normalise failure. It may be that the ideal citizen is an ideal citizen once he volunteers for failure, once he gives his consent.

Everybody knows that failure is relative. However, inasmuch as people fail, they’re not condemned if the failure is normal. It’s when somebody steps outside the norm and fails that condemnation arises. Failure also has its norms.

How is truth going to exist if our take on reality is measured according to our needs?

Truth and convenience are always intimately linked, that’s to say, truth always has its practical side.

Undoubtedly, happiness is better than misfortune. Why do so many writers sing of misfortune? Undoubtedly, they have to justify their life. It is they who devour rays of light. Life is complex and heterogeneous. Bleak views of life ignore the world’s heterogeneity. Undoubtedly, sometimes there’s nothing like the taste of one’s own tears. Or the smell of one’s own shit.

Why does misfortune have a greater, even more memorable, impact than happiness? Is it because happiness is diffuse whereas misfortune is pointed?

Since everything is devilishly complex, sometimes it’s necessary to simplify. Since things are sometimes too simple, even crude, it’s necessary to surround them with an aura of complexity.

Everything can be criticised: the flower for not being a fish, the fish for not being a volcano, the volcano for being unpredictable. When the critical spirit degenerates, it can turn into an offspring of deviousness, a mere sadistic sublimation.

Some things die, others commit suicide, others have to be killed and yet they just won’t bloody disappear.

So long as it’s possible, we need to learn how to stay on elegant terms with our own ego.

Is passion that way of spitting the toothpaste against the basin? Would this be a question strictly of male passion?

Can some disagreements with reality be healed by the hallucinatory effect of television? That’s to say, such vivid colours can bestow upon reality a more interesting appearance.

If you pretend detachment or even modesty, that distance turns into real distance momentarily. There’s nothing like pretending in order to appreciate not just the relativity of all perception, but also the richness of the whole.

It’s difficult to see what’s inside one. You need an endoscope, an outside screen and an expert.

The lament is a real contemporary taboo.

Toys are the first works of art we meet: art is a substitute for the toy’s intensity. The first creative and destructive impulses are found in play, and the toy is the first object with which we have a relationship of fascination.

The toy is the first object to undergo the transmutation that art undergoes: a dummy is a nipple, but also a disgusting, throwable object that censures the expression of crying.

Boys and girls cry when they come into the world: they cry with rage, with fury, with anguish, with pain, with grief, with bile. They cry because they sense that they don’t want to be here, they cry because they know that later they won’t be able to cry.

The tears shed by children are the tears that adults cannot shed: only children are allowed to cry in all places, at all times, they are the guardians of mourning, those who remind us that we should cry till we’re dry. To cry in public is a taboo that only children can transgress. When a child cries in public for no apparent reason, it sets everybody’s nerves on edge. When an adult cries in public for no apparent reason, it is considered a shameless act that is punished with uneasy empathy.

Children also cry for the pleasure of stretching their lungs. That may be why we continue to cry at beauty.

Translated by Jonathan Dunne & Susana Medina