I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella." (spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)

The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

In the grand collage that is Dada, past and future are equally usable.

In order to go beyond ideas to direct realization, it's essential to have a great deal of purity.

Most martial arts have to do with the mind, ultimately. The ability to be unafraid, to walk away from a fight without fear - that is control.

Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.

Your mom's in our business...she's in our business... Can't you see, girl, that your mom's trying to end this?

I want the shuffles and echoes, and a certain mysteriousness... It's so bloody hard to paint.

When we started out in '64, um, I was playing Number One, which was a woman second in command of a star ship.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

For my own singing, I used to be attracted by the baroque, the flashier the better, but now I prefer a simpler, purer style.