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

The writer’s job is to write with rigor, with commitment, to defend what they believe with all the talent they have. I think that’s part of the moral obligation of a writer, which cannot be only purely artistic. I think a writer has some kind of responsibility at least to participate in the civic debate. I think literature is impoverished, if it becomes cut from the main agenda of people, of society, of life.

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them; those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition which is our lot: always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.

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

In my case, literature is a kind of revenge. It's something that gives me what real life can't give me - all the adventures, all the suffering. All the experiences I can only live in the imagination, literature completes.