EA: One of your characters says, "One has the moral obligation to be responsible for one's actions and for one's words but also for one's silence."

RB: One of my characters says that? It sounds so good it hardly seems written by me.

EA: Is it fair to say that about writers.

RB: No, for writers that isn't fair, but without a doubt, in predetermined moments, yes. If I'm walking down the street and see a paedophile molesting a kid and I stop and silently stare, not only am I responsible for my silence but I am also a complete son of a bitch. However, there is a certain type of silence in which -

EA: Are there literary silences?

RB: Yes, there are literary silences. Kafka's, for example, which is a silence that cannot be. When he asks for his papers to be burned, Kafka is opting for silence, opting for a literary silence, all in a literary era. That is to say, he was completely moral. Kafka's literature, aside from being the best work, the highest literary work of the twentieth century, is of an extreme morality and of an extreme gentility, things that do not that usually do not go together either.

EA: And what of (Juan) Rulfo's silence?

RB: Rulfo's silence, I think, is obedient to something so quotidian that explaining it is a waste of time. There are several versions: One told by Monterosso is that Rulfo had an uncle so-and-so who told him stories and when Rulfo was asked why he didn't write anymore, his answer was that uncle so-and-so had died. And I believe it too. Another explanation is simple and natural and that it is that everything has an expiration date. For example, I am more worried about Rimbaudian silence than I am about Rulfian silence. Rulfo stopped writing because he had already written everything he wanted to write and because he see's himself incapable of writing anything better, he simply stops. Rimbaud would probably have been able to write something much better, which is to say bringing his words up even higher, but his silence is a silence that raises questions for Westerners. Rulfo's silence doesn't raise questions; it is a close silence, quotidian. After dessert, what the hell else are you going to eat. There is a third literary silence - one doesn't seek it - of the shade which one is sure was there under the threshold and which has never been made tangible. There stands the silence of Georg Buchner, for example. He died at twenty five or twenty four years of age, he leaves behind three or four stage plays, masterworks. One of them is Woyzeck, an absolute masterwork. Another is about the death of Danton, which is an enormous masterwork, not absolute but quite notable. The other two - one is called Leonce y Lena, I can't remember the other one - are fundementally important. All before he turned twenty five. What might have happened had Buchner not died; what kind of writer might he have been? The kind of silence that isn't sought out is the silence of ... I do not dare call it destiny ... a manifestation of impotence. The silence of death is the worst kind of silence, because Rulfian silence is accepted and Rimbaudian silence is sought, but the silence of death is one that cuts the edge off what could have been and what never will be, that which we will never know. We'll never know if Buchner would have been bigger than Goethe. I think so, but we'll never know. We'll never know what he might have written at age thirty. And that extends across the whole planet like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.