Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another.

How emigration is actually lived - well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.

I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.

It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.

Ask any human being alive if they're the same person they were seven years ago and they're going to tell you they aren't.

I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.

For fiction, Im not particularly nationalistic. Im not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.

As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasnt made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.

I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.

I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.

I called the desert into a storm.

You shouldn't call then anything. They're poor unfortunate people who cannot help the way they look,

He was in that stage of love–and of liquor–where one is completely taken up with oneself, and can get along very well without the other party.

A second characteristic of our time is the prevalence of nationalism. This is still spreading, affecting new communities, more peripheral regions and so-called backward peoples.

Pilots are a rare kind of human. They leave the ordinary surface of the word, to purify their soul in the sky, and they come down to earth, only after receiving the communion of the infinite.

I've never regretted a swim

Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.

When you’re sitting in a dark room, you can either sit and curse the darkness—or you can light a candle.

It is our first duty to serve society, and after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls.

To teach is great, but to inspire is divine.