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.

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.

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.

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

The unfairness of judging others comes in that we judge them on the basis of our own values and beliefs, yet we can never exactly stand on common ground.

Most often simplicity defines the true beauty of a great life.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are dreamers and those who are being dreamed.

The day-to-day life we lead has nothing to do with enlightenment. It is just around the corner, and we don't see it.

It is only doubt that creates. It is only the minority that counts.

I give you this toast: To the Hobbits. May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.

Too much money ain't enough money.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing.

Coming to terms with the fear of death is conducive to healing, positive personality transformation, and consciousness evolution.

Earlier on in my career I felt that I had to hide behind a lot of different masks, and showboat ways of performing. Now, that's a lie. The less I have to hide, the less I have to act.