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.

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 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.

I know not what it is about you that makes me go crazy but I do know that the fragrance of your skin is more sublime than that of all the perfumes of this world!

Republics are ungrateful.

The rich people are doing well but regular people suffer. We'll all be better off when we realize that we're part of one big family.

Male supremacy has kept woman down. It has not knocked her out.

I find that when people get a script, they know within five pages if the writer can write. Once you're five pages in, it doesn't matter whose name is on the cover, you're not even thinking about it.

Only because The Runaways were my baby and there's no reason to get it back together except to totally have fun. If that's not the goal, then I don't want to do it.

When reason sleeps, the monsters of repression will emerge.

The most wretched have yet hope.

I think I'm the first man to sit on top of the world.

The pope can go ahead and claim that Trump is not a Christian, but you can't go there when we talking about the president of the United States.