A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off.

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.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

You know what hurts the most? It's when someone made you feel special yesterday and behaves as if you don't exist today.

What I must do is all that concerns me,

It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.

If you compromise in any kind of movement or any kind of wave of revolution, if you sort of play the game, things are gonna change far more slowly than you need them to.

I'm a huge admirer of Pope Francis and everything he stands for. I think he's an incredibly connected spiritual and authentic being.

People realise that his promise [Tony Blair's] to 'save the NHS' was just talk.

Our main reproductive organ is our brain.

Knowledge is the rediscovering of our own insight.

But if I keep my core and back strong, the scoliosis doesn't really bother me.