I don't accept the idea that literature can be just entertainment and that there is no consequences of literature in the real world.

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

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.

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Violence represents the worst kind of conformism.

Prosperity or egalitarianism -- you have to choose. I favor freedom -- you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

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.