There's a certain advantage to living in a small country like Guatemala, I think. You don't feel so distant from political reality there. When things….

I'm not a Mexican writer, but I think everything that happens in Mexico affects the Mexican writers I know, in their sense of being human and of bein….

I'm a little skeptical of so-called narco fiction, I have to say, though some writers I admire may have written some narco fiction. You feel the drea….

Great fiction has been written out of the very darkest circumstances of our narco violence, and nothing written in either fiction or nonfiction has p….

I'm specifically referring to this certain feeling of sadness, fear, and helplessness that descended on me at the Mexico City protest a day or two af….

I feel a responsibility, as I get older, to be responsible to what I've experienced, to what I've lived and been in a position to witness. I realize ….

People in the big rich countries are often extremely dismissive of the small countries. They think nothing that happens there is of any interest or t….

Mexico just needs more journalists, and especially more good places to publish and exhibit. There are all kinds of censorship practiced in Mexico, no….

Interviewing is in some ways the art of memory..

What I see of the US Presidential elections from down here makes me want to disengage from that particular reality and just hole up and read. It's tr….

I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writin….

Donald Trump is an especially depressing phenomena because he is so debased and debasing and millions and millions of people want him to be president….

Maybe Pope Francis will say something on his visit to the US, maybe he'll rebuke Donald Trump and anti-immigrant racism and demagoguery beautifully, ….

I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to w….

I've written one book-length piece of journalism. The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi? That book had an impact. Eight years after ….

If I were the Mexican-American father of a young child who was having trouble sleeping because of Donald Trump, or who was being bullied in school be….

Donald Trump is seriously dark and disturbing. You can't just dismiss it as one more example of American pop culture grotesque..

Someone wrote in the New York Times recently that if Donald Trump was allowed to go through with his plans, he'd become one of history's major human ….

I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story migh….

The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suff….

I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of a….