I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

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.

I think in a country like mine, violence is at the root of all human relations.

A novel which persuades us of its truth is true however full of lies it may be

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

I was very young and lived with my grandparents in a villa with white walls in the Calle Ocharan, in Miraflores.