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.

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.

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.

We are eternally Spiritual Beings, even in human form.

There's nothing cool about turning against God. There's nothing fun or cute or right about compromising who God wanted you to be.

Whatever you would make habitual, practice it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practice it, but accustom yourself to something else.

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.

A man that has lost moral sense is like a man in battle with both of his legs shot off: he has nothing to stand on.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.

I've built my homeland, I've even founded my state - in my language.

Creation is not a hurdle on the road to God, it is the road itself.