We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it’s not just a very sophisticated entertainment, but a way to act.
Reading was such an enrichment of my life. And it was that pleasure that I had as a very young reader probably that is the origin of my vocation.
Journalism has been very important for me – for a long time I made my living as a journalist, and it also serves as a source of ideas. Many of the things I have written I would not have written without the experience of being a journalist.
Journalism is a way of voicing opinion, of participating in the political, social, or cultural debate.
I completely believe that – literature for me is a way of life. That’s probably true of all writers or all artists. I think in the end this kind of activity absorbs one in such a way that it becomes one’s way of life.
I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.
Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.
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.
Prosperity or egalitarianism – you have to choose. I favor freedom – you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.
I write because I’m unhappy. I write because it’s a way of fighting unhappiness.
But what do I have? The things I’m told and the things I tell, that’s all. And as far as I know, that never yet made anyone fly.
I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.
We must mistrust utopias: they usually end in holocausts.
No democracy is born perfect, and none ever gets to be perfect. Yet democracy is superior to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes because, unlike them, democracy is perfectible.
Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?
It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.
Death isn’t enough. It doesn’t remove the stain. But a slap, a whiplash, square on the face, does. Because a man’s face is as sacred as his mother or his wife.
I don’t accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.
Maintain democracy or go to dictatorship: that is what is at stake in these elections.
I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.
When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.