Original source: Para un escritor la vida debe ser el foco que la muerte ilumina a diario. Zárate, Y. (2019). "José Baroja". En revista Momentos Ahora o nunca. Número 139. Tlaxcala, México; p. 24.

[the first ingredient of his work]... is a clear preoccupation with death - intimations of mortality.

A writer should always bravely face life, risking death and mutilation in order to dethrone an emperor.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.

The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

For the whole life of a philosopher is, as the same philosopher says, a meditation on death.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

Good writers touch life often.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual

Your life informs your writing.

To live is to battle the demons
in the heart as well as the brain.
To write is to preside at judgement day over one's self.