I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.

I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.

I began visiting Lima's prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, 'Lost City Radio,' was published in Peru.

For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.

Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.

Three days later, they're still on cloud nine.