The secret to a masterpiece is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

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, has become literary.

It is rare and almost impossible for a novel to have only one narrator.

Revolution will free society of its afflictions, while science will free the individual of his.

The worst thing that can happen to an artist is to be subsidized by the state. It leads to an intellectual and artistic castration.

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.

Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them, sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly, are the true barbarians of our time.