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

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 think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

Feel within, the pure and unconditional Love and embrace all.

If you feed a man a meal you only feed him for a day-but if you teach a man to grow food you feed him for a lifetime.

There are only do and don’t

I love being in my garden. I don't plant a lot of exotic flora, but I do spend a lot of time outside doing manual labour.

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.

It is a sin to write this.

The joy of joys is the person of light but unmalicious humor.

The brightest stars emerge out of the blackest darkness

We can't want an education for kids more than they want it for themselves.

Parental Discretion is advised, but will be completely f*n, ignored