I’ve been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don’t have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That’s why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
When a man’s earning his living doing things he doesn’t like, he feels like a slave; when he’s doing what he loves, he feels like a prince.
When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. It’s good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It’s not a lecture.
Society decides when we get old. But the spirit never ages.
No complaining about how hard it is to write, we are all so, so lucky to write, to sit down, inside, and write words on paper. There is no greater freedom, no greater good, nothing that brings more joy.
I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later.
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn’t find a place for myself, for years and years.
Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul.
Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.
That is the best part of writing: finding the hidden treasures, giving sparkle to worn out events, invigorating the tired soul with imagination, creating some kind of truth with many lies.
The writer of good will carries a lamp to illuminate the dark corners.
Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn’t get processed in the mind until you do the editing.
Affection is like the noonday sun; it does not need the presence of another to be manifest.
A book is not an end in itself; it is only a way to touch someone – a bridge extended across a space of loneliness and obscurity – and sometimes it is a way of winning other people to our causes.
When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique.
With women the best aphrodisiac is words.
Writers speak for those who are kept in silence.
The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential.
Only that, nothing more – a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers.
I don’t think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.