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.

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.

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

You can’t keep messing me around like this. It’s been going on too long. I can’t take it anymore. I get sick every time you come around. Then I get sick when you leave. You’re like a disease to me.

There comes a moment on a journey when something sweet, something irresistible and charming as wine raised to thirsty lips, wells up in the traveller's being.

When the Lord fights the battles of the saints, he does it so effectually that nobody gets nervous but the enemy

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to human welfare.

Going backwards is never an option.

The predicament of a person in a restaurant who is unable to determine his or her designated restroom (e.g., turtles and tortoises).

Entrepreneurs need to be positive. Always. Entrepreneurs need to be brave, often. And lastly, entrepreneurs need to be obsessed.

Books may be classed from the Faculties of the mind

People are becoming more intimately acquainted with people who are different than them - it's not so unusual anymore.

We must understand variation.