Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagles' nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

Cooking requires confident guesswork and improvisation-- experimentation and substitution, dealing with failure and uncertainty in a creative way

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

I never stay with people and I never look people up when I travel. I depend more on just chance meetings. The advantage is that people don't know who I am. I meet people casually and they're not doing me a big favor because I'm going to write something.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

It is usually expensive and lonely to be principled.