You cannot teach creativity — how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

What is happening in the country for such political, moral and cultural blindness to take hold? Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at play in these elections.

Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read,...

Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual’s sovereignty.

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

It isn’t true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

they are defending the little power that they have left.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.

Prosperity or egalitarianism / you have to choose. I favor freedom / you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

Vicente Fox has a truly titanic task upon his shoulders because dismantling an authoritarian apparatus that has had a grip on power for 71 years means reforming the state practically from head to foot.

If you are killed because you are a writer, that’s the maximum expression of respect, you know.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

Feast of the Goat. It has been like a huge birthday present that this film based on one of my novels, one of the novels I worked hardest on to write, is released on the...