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

There was a problem: No one cared about human rights anymore, not at home or abroad. They cared about growth–hoped for and celebrated in all the newspapers, invoked by zealous bureaucrats in every self-serving television...

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.

I began visiting Lima’s prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, ‘Lost City Radio,’ was published in Peru.

That morning, he was afraid of becoming old, and it was a very specific kind of old age he feared, one which had nothing to do with the number of years since your birth. He...

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.

I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.

Nepotism is the lowest and least imaginative form of corruption.

I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I’m thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when...

Publication in ‘The New Yorker’ meant everything, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.

You don’t sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet.” Rey smiled. “Can I be both?” “But you’d rather be a poet.””Who wouldn’t?” he said.

For fiction, I’m not particularly nationalistic. I’m not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.

At the most basic level, I appreciate writers who have something to say.

I love the novel because it’s like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it’s going to take you.

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don’t understand, in a new universe. So...

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

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 think probably the thing I’m worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I’m often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And...

Luz’s manner of speaking made it clear that she had no idea what she might say next. It wasn’t that she made things up, strictly speaking–only that facts were merely a point of departure for...

As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn’t made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.

I’m a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela’s famous novel ‘The Underdogs,’ and that says a lot about who they are and...

And what does he feel?””He feels uneasy. A little afaid. Angry. Oddly, a hint of pride.””Good,” Henry said. “ANd where are you?””Backstage.”Henry shook his head gravely. “THere’s no such thing as backstage. The play begins,...

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.

The city was lovely. There could be no place in the world to which he belonged so completely.That was why he’d always dreamed of leaving, and why he’d always been so afraid to go.

Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That’s half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in...

When I was younger, I was able to write with music playing in the background, but these days, I can’t. I find it distracting. Even when the music is just instrumental or has lyrics in...

The phone collapsed distances, just as the radio did, and, like the radio, it relied on the miracle of imagination: one had to concentrate deeply, plunge headlong into it.

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.