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.

A novel is like an animal you have to hunt down and kill. If you let it sit for two days, it's got a two-day head start. So, if I just look at it every day, I'm so much better off.

I write 1,000 words a day first thing in the morning but I cannot write 240 characters to describe a piece that I spent six weeks working on with a producer.

My first and last love will always be fiction. It's the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. 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 do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. Im thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.

I have a love/hate relationship with the internet. It's obviously the central tool of how I work, and how I keep in touch with all the writers and then producers that I'm collaborating with. Skype saves my life, you know.

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.