The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.

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.

No one has ever held me so tightly. It's a shock to matter this much. It isn't like arms are around me, it's more like a house, as if he has made a house around me. As he did around Tommy.

It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.

Exercise is a dirty word. Every time I hear it I wash my mouth out with chocolate.

I transmit but do not create. I place my trust in the teachings of antiquity.

I never really drove a cab, but I do have a hack license in case of emergencies - like no money.

What is truth? A difficult question; but I have solved it for myself by saying that it is what the 'voice within' tells you.

And by the right thing, I mean that whatever step we take next, the first criteria we should consider is the people who have been loyal to us, thus far, which is primarily our audience.

It's a standard staple in Japanese cinema to cut somebody's arm off and have red water hoses for veins, spraying blood everywhere.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

Meditation is bringing the mind home.