Soldados de Salamina

I added: 'I don't write novels any more.' I thought of Conchi and said: 'I've discovered I have no imagination.'
'To write novels you don't need an imagination,' Bolaño said. 'Just a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections.'

'All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction.'

Todos los buenos relatos son relatos reales, por lo menos para quien los lee, que es el único que cuenta.

...Heroes are only heroes when they die or get killed. The real heroes are born out of war and die in war. There are no living heroes, young man. They're all dead. Dead, dead, dead.

All good tales are true tales, at least for those who read them, which is all that counts.

'If there's one thing I hate the Communists for, Your Excellency,' Foxa once said to Franco, 'it's for obliging me to join the Falange.'

The book's called Our War, and it's pretty good, though he tells a tremendous number of lies, as in all memoirs.

'Of all the stories in History,' I thought as Miralles spoke, 'the saddest is Spain's, because it ends badly.' Then I thought:  'Does it end badly?'

I don't listen to it any more; each time I do it makes me feel bad. I suddenly start thinking about what's happened to me, and especially what hasn't happened to me.

...over the course of those days I had time to put my ideas about him in order and came to realize that the character and his story had over time turned into one of those obsessions that constitute the indispensable fuel for writing.

That explained, in part, why so many writers of the moment, in Spain and all over Europe, changed in so few years from the playful, sporty aestheticism of the roaring twenties to the pure, hard political combat of the ferocious thirties.

He (Antonio Machado) was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won.'

...at that time I'd not read a single line of Sánchez Mazas, and to me he was no more than a mist-shrouded name, just one more of the many Falangist politicians and writers that the last years of Spanish history had hastily buried, as if the gravediggers feared they weren't entirely dead.