So let's start with the philosophical question of who I am. I am me and my circumstance. You are too, I know, but now, I'm told, I have to talk about me. The truth is that, in this life, I could have been anything but a writer or, better said, novelist, because I don't regard myself as a writer.

I didn't see this coming, I mean being a novelist. I wanted to be a waiter. I think I could have been an excellent waiter. I like chatting, joking and, when necessary, I'm obliging enough. In fact I've spent, and I spend more time leaning on bars in coffee shops than I do in my office.

Valencian writer and journalist (Sedaví, 1951)

That's why I'm a novelist and not a writer. Writers do everything and novelists only do novels. Less work, more free time.

This means that I'm a fortuitous circumstance, which is all very fine, because I don't plan anything. Now, maybe I've always had what they call a novelist's gifts. Let me explain myself: at home I was the one who, by the fireplace on long winter nights, or under the porch some spring nights, took it upon myself to entertain my family, including the sheep. I was a pain in the neck, to tell the truth. There were days when everyone got the hell out of there, running away from me. I cheated too. Sometimes I plagiarised fragments of Jules Verne's stories, touched them up a bit and told them with incredible pomposity. Luckily, reading didn't have a prominent place in my family and nobody picked up on my creative cunning. At home, they only knew about Blasco Ibáñez from photos cut out from the Mercantil Valenciano.

It's true that I'm a novelist and it's probably because I wouldn't know how to do anything else. I don't have a profession (and don't want to). Being a waiter is the only job I might have done with a bit of professionalism, but I'm not frustrated. In some ways I am a waiter: I talk like mad - in the form of a book - and I'm obliging. I mean I deliver the manuscript more or less on the date the publisher puts in the contract (and I also charge for consumption). I'm a waiter and maybe that's why I write.

Copyright © 1996 Institució de les Lletres Catalanes. Reproduced with the author's permission