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.

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 isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.

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.