Top 223 Quotes & Sayings by Peruvian Authors - Page 3

A lot of fashion photographers will do the same sort of image for many years; it's easier to be successful if you do that.

Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.

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.

Publication in 'The New Yorker' meant everything, and it's no exaggeration to say that it changed my life.

Charm, I think, is education, really, no? I was educated to be nice to everybody. If you want to be rude and mean, I'm sure your life isn't that nice.

I always feel I sing better if I have been playing a lot of tennis or football.

In fact, this is a blackmail of the terrorists at the expense of the suffering of the hostages.

I'm a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela's famous novel 'The Underdogs,' and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.

With El Sistema, you can create orchestras everywhere; then they can decide whether they want to become professional musicians. The aim is not only to create musicians, but to create people.

As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn't made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.

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.

My original idea was to photograph Princess Diana in her tiara. But then I thought, am I interested in seeing another picture of her as a royal person, or would I rather see what she is actually about? And that's why I decided to do her without jewels, without shoes, without trimmings.

Up to now we have faced external problems in an isolated fashion. One of these problems is precisely the drug trade and what has been the result? A very weak and fragile position.

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values, and transform people into little monsters.

The patient is in intensive care but still alive.

I've been criticised for pretty, smiley photographs, but at least someone is happy! In my mind, I am always giving the image to the sitter.

I am very much about promoting Lima because I think Peru and the mountains and the Incas, everybody is aware of those, but Lima is something that people should discover - especially our food.

A novel is something, while despair is nothing.

I don't like to fill up my schedule. It's easy to do, but then that year arrives, and you find that you have no time, so you are desperately trying to cancel something. I have to think of my family.

Eroticism is born at a time in civilisation when sexual instinct becomes deanimalised and enriched with contributions from art and from literature. A world of theatricality emerges around the act of love.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

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.

I am trying to capture the women I photograph at their happiest. That is when they look their most beautiful. But I do understand that you have to make somebody feel completely comfortable in order to bring that out.

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

I would love to bring the children from my foundation Sinfonia por el Peru to play with some of the best musicians in the world.

England gave me a chance. It's a very individual country where people have a personal style; they don't all follow a trend. The subtlety and wit of England is incredible, and they are very creative.

In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.

A fashion photographer is nothing without clothes and hair and makeup. And when I speak to other photographers, a lot of them can't reference a picture by the designer. Me, I say, 'The Balenciaga.' And I go to the shows. I feel like it's my business.

I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.

When I was younger, I was able to write with music playing in the background, but these days, I can't. I find it distracting. Even when the music is just instrumental or has lyrics in a language I don't understand, the clash between the voices in my head and the song can be very disorienting.

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

You have to be you. You can't be anybody else. If you speak loudly, and people tell you to speak quietly, you can do it for a little bit, but loud people are loud, and people who are not, are not.

I concentrated on Rossini when I began, and I never really felt any competition. I sang in the best houses, and I believed I was always a first choice. I was lucky in a way - I never felt there was someone else who was getting the roles in another theatre and that we were competing.

You are born with a voice. And in a way, you don't choose what you want to sing. It's the quality of your voice that matches a certain repertoire, and that's what you're going to sing.

For all the creationists out there, Darwin's just an atheist. But he was actually agnostic.

When I'm acting, I've always got to make it make sense to me why I do anything. Whether it's right or wrong, I've just got to believe this is the reason why I am doing this and just go with it.

Since it is impossible to know what's really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.

At one moment, I thought that if I didn't do a picture in a certain way, then it wasn't a 'Mario Testino Picture.' And I've realized that Mario Testino is everything, Mario Testino is whatever he feels like being, because it always ends up looking like me, whatever I do.

When I'm doing sports, I always think of how it's related to singing, and when I watch tennis, I learn a lot for my singing: how the players are focused, how they use their technique, and, in the case of Roger Federer, how effortless it is and how beautiful it is to watch - like bel canto, in a way. That's how singing should be.

We expect that in the next years, the economy will improve. And we expect that extreme poverty will drop from 22 percent to 11 percent by the year 2000.

England is the country where I learned my profession. They are the ones that trained me, they are the ones that believed in me.

There are never any absolutes in the fashion business: one day you may like black, and the next day you like colour. I think it's a good lesson that we should never believe too much in any one thing - because the next day it's out, and if we're stuck to it, we're out, too.

I am in favor of economic freedom, but I am not a conservative.

Prosperity or egalitarianism - you have to choose. I favor freedom - you never achieve real equality anyway: you simply sacrifice prosperity for an illusion.

I find that my entire life has come to me, and things happened without me planning them. You know, I never asked to photograph Princess Diana, and that made me more famous than I wanted. I never asked to photograph Madonna, and that pushed me to another level. There are things that just take you into the limelight.

To me, the magic of photography, per se, is that you can capture an instant of a second that couldn't exist before and couldn't exist after. It's almost like a cowboy that draws his gun. You draw a second before or after, you miss and you're dead - not them. To me, photography's always like that.

I don't think I am even the best I can be. I like to listen to other singers and learn from them, but I'm always working on myself, trying to improve, trying to be very tough with myself.

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.

In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters.

Even if change in a voice is light, and people maybe don't notice it, that slight change is, for singers, a bit of an earthquake.

I feel like there's a lot of great writing on television.

I started watching 'Star Trek' as a kid.

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.

'Lost' was filmed in Hawaii, so we stayed there and loved it, so we thought, 'Why would we leave?' It is a bit like growing up in a bubble, but I don't think that's a bad thing, as you will eventually get out and see the real world.

There is something about Prince William and Prince Harry that brings real modernity to the British royal family. They are also very open, human, and kind, and this is what I have tried to capture in the pictures I have taken of them as well as in my pictures of Prince William and Catherine.

My favourite subjects at school were algebra and logic: making a big problem into something small.

I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I am obsessed by people. Usually I try to get the girl out of the model instead of the model out of the girl.

When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal - my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.