One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.
Le raccontai tutta la mia vita, non quella passata ma quella che avrei vissuto in futuro.
El secreto de la felicidad, o, por lo menos, de la tranquilidad, es saber separar el sexo del amor. Y, si es posible, eliminar el amor romántico de tu vida, que es el que hace sufrir. Así se vive más tranquilo y se goza más.
I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.
Reality is the richest thing there is, the most important thing there is. Our imagination allows us to live an artificial life that is wonderful, extremely rich, but I don't believe any artist would dare to say that artifice is better than real life.
Literature is dangerous: it awakens a rebellious attitude in us.
The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me.
When I was growing up, the Spanish-speaking world was Balkanized. We were isolated. We didn't know what was happening in cultural terms in Ecuador, Colombia and Chile. Nowadays, this has changed a lot - fortunately for writers and readers. There is much more integration.
If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.
Good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is, without a doubt, hard work. There are many things behind a good novel, but in particular, there is a lot of work - a lot of patience, a lot of stubbornness, and a critical spirit.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.
In fiction, you are not limited by real facts. You can manipulate reality; you can invent without being disloyal to the essence of history.
In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel 'Captain Pantoja and the Special Service.' It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo.
I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.
No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.
When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.
The Nobel prize is a fairytale for a week and a nightmare for a year. You can't imagine the pressure to give interviews, to go to book fairs.
Each book, for me, has been an adventure, a period of time dedicated to study, to document certain facts, to traveling, and also to fantasize and to invent.
When I was young, I was a passionate reader of Sartre. I've read the American novelists, in particular the lost generation - Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - especially Faulkner. Of the authors I read when I was young, he is one of the few who still means a lot to me.
