Kids are the ones who create; I find it really great to have my inner child still alive. - Rosa Montero

Stereotypes stick in the mind like parasites: it's easier to increase a country's GDP per head twelvefold – in the last 40 years Spain's has gone from $2,413 to $29,651 – than to eliminate our neighbours' prejudices about us...It's true that until relatively recently Spain was chauvinistic and backward, yet it's equally true that there have been dramatic changes in the last 40 years...The fact is that Spain is no longer notable for its machismo, when compared with its European neighbours.

For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me—I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired—it is something essential and structural. It’s like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don’t know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words. But they are two extremely opposite genres; let’s say as essays are to poetry. In particular, within journalism, clearness is a value. The clearer and less misleading a work of journalism is, the better. In a novel, ambiguity is a value. The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don’t know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest.

The print journalism I do, reporting, is a literary genre as any other, and it can also be as sublime as any other.