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.

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.

I think I'm an American writer writing about Latin America, and I'm a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.

You need a unified view of what's going on. If you can't impose structure and discipline on (developer) practitioners, you're subject to chaos.

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.

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.