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.
I try to let go of the intellect and just tell the story. I only read the page I have in front of me on the screen. Then when the whole story is told, I print it, wait a week and read it.
The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.
I was a lousy journalist. I could never be objective. Sometimes I invented the whole story.
I’m interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.
I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.
I’m living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.
I’ve been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.
My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.