I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
How emigration is actually lived – well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
I think probably the thing I’m worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I’m often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can’t. I would die. There’s no way I could write a column. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
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. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
I began visiting Lima’s prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, ‘Lost City Radio,’ was published in Peru. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I’m thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That’s half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
I think I’m an American writer writing about Latin America, and I’m a Latin American writer who happens to write in English. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
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. Daniel Alarcon Read Quote
