3 Quotes & Sayings By Enrique Vilamatas

Enrique Vila-Matas is an award-winning Spanish writer and filmmaker, who was born in Madrid and lives there. He has published more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction, as well as a number of collections of short stories and poetry. He has received the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters and the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages Read more

He is the recipient of fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin and the NEA. Vila-Matas's first novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Vintage, 1998), was a finalist for The Man Booker Prize. His latest novel, The Case Against Love (Vintage, 2012), was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction in 2013.

He is currently touring with his latest novel, A Very Large Expanse of Ground (Vintage, 2015).

1
He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it. Enrique VilaMatas
2
He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room". Enrique VilaMatas