What I'm most interested in is not necessarily the wound, but the scar. Not how someone is wounded, but what the scar does later.

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.

I don't care about wearing branded clothes or flaunting brands. But I do care about the books that I read and the music that I listen to.

Be loving and kind to everyone and every one will be loving and kind to you.

God would never place a dream in your heart that He didn't have the ability to fulfill.

Seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.

And future deeds crowded round us as the countless stars in the night. [Ger., Und kunftige Thaten drangen wie die Sterne Rings um uns her unzahlig aus der Nacht.]

You're not anyone in America unless you're on TV.

My assumption is that fundamentally the picture of the human animal, as developed by Freud, is largely right.

Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born

It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.