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

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

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.

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

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

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

Violence represents the worst kind of conformism.