It's true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.

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.

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.

Most suffering comes from the failure to adapt and a resistance to change.

You have been “self-pitying” for long years now and things don’t seem to improve. Just try a few days of good self-esteeming” and you’ll see things taking a better shape!

If a spiritual being is naive to the lower aspects of the world, they usually are killed or die young. Did Jesus really know which of the twelve would betray him? I doubt it.

It is better not to express what one means than to express what one does not mean.

I went as an observer, not a participant, for I do not think that I ever spoke. I wanted to understand the issues under discussion, evaluate the arguments, see the calibre of the men involved.

When you are forced to think, you expand your mental capacity. When you expand your mental capacity, your wealth increases.

One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.

Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born, To signify thou camest to bite the world.

What freezings I have felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere!

The oldest man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs.