I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.

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.

If you look deep enough into anything, sense is always there to be made, wouldn’t you agree?

Nightly you retrace your steps again to return to the scene of the crime. It's uncanny how you hover in the air of the wreckage that you left behind.

One of the great things about anarchy is that it’s hard to get it organized.

A single idea if it is right saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.

My wife asks me, when I get home from auditions, if they asked how tall I am. And if I say "Yes," then she says, "Okay, you didn't get that job."

One must learn to love oneself with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.

New York is a great place to be fed in the arts. The arts in general are a large part of my life. The city was my postgraduate course.

When I was born there were still different drinking fountains you had to drink out of.

You are meant to be going somewhere, to be headed to a destination. The poorest person in the world is a person without a dream

I'm honest. I say what I feel. I try to be tactful, but I can't not say what I feel. I have a really big problem with that.