The quote in the question is from Mario Vargas Llosa, from his book The Truth of Lies.

The extract “A community without a written literature expresses itself with less precision, with less richness of nuance, and with less clarity than a community whose principal instrument of communication, the word, has been cultivated and perfected by means of literary texts. … A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression.” contains verbs in the following tenses (irrespective of the sequence)