"It was election year, and his paranoid sensitivity conflicted with his hard boiled reason. Jose Daniel Fierro argued out loud with his computer screen and told it that if they wanted to tap his phone then there was no problem; on the contrary, it would work perfectly well then; but he argued back that those bastards were a bunch of con-men to begin with. Why would they want to tap his telephone anyway? What the hell had he done lately? Sign a petition protesting against University bureaucracy. Crap. Write a novel, another one, about police corruption. Blowing populist tunes on his own trumpet. He had spoken at a rally for the Democratic Revolutionary Party. Nothing, within the system's logic. He was one more intellectual. Or rather, a goddamn citizen. At its height the Mexican state would have contemplated historic alternatives - either exile in the Islas Marias islands or the embassy in Istanbul - but time had devalued writers and their ilk in the state's perverse logic. Now, they set up museums and scholarships, strange 30,000 -new-peso prizes if you were on one side, nonexistence or certificates of oblivion if you were on the other."

Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Leonardo's Bicycle.