Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a brilliant author. He is a person who has lived an interesting life, read widely, traveled, reflected, and then written a prolific amount about a wide range of topics. What distinguishes Pérez-Reverte´s work is that he is passionate about what he writes. His arguments are well thought out and deeply interesting. Like all great authors, he convinces you subtly without your even realizing it. You can´t help but agree with him.
I have translated several of his quotes below:
1. Doubt is what keeps people young. Certainty is like a malignant virus. It infects you with old age. 1
2. Books are doors that lead you to the street…with books you learn, educate yourself, travel, dream, imagine, live other lives and multiply your own by a thousand.
3. Looking clearly, the world has stopped thinking about death. The belief that we aren´t going to die makes us weak, and is worse for us.
4. …It´s true that any detail can change one´s life. A walk one takes, for example, or arriving late because of a conversation, a cigarette, a memory.
5. I´m convinced that each building, painting, old book that is destroyed or lost, it makes us a little bit more orphaned. It impoverishes us.
6. Without understanding History there is no possibility of starting to act in the present. You can´t move in the present and you can´t act in it. Knowing History, its mechanism of analysis, of comprehension, gives you the knowledge of the game. How could you dare to make a move if you didn’t know the rules of a chess game? 2
7. Without culture (I´m referring to the culture of truth, education, and clarity) there is no possible future. Nations that aren´t cultured, and above all those that are deliberately uncultured, have problematic futures.
Arturo Perez-Reverte Speaking at a book conference (in English with simultaneous translation):
1 Quotes 1-5 from Psicologiaymente.com (https://psicologiaymente.com/reflexiones/frases-arturo-perez-reverte)
2 Qoutes 6-7 from es.wikiqoute.org (https://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arturo_P%C3%A9rez-Reverte)