They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.
I’m not above anybody. I’m, I’m not better than anybody. I am made of the same material that everybody else is and if somebody can be a saint, so can I and if somebody can be a torturer, so can I.
I’m aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
Writing is a constant exercise in longing.
Empowering women means trusting them.
What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.
If I didn’t write my soul would dry up and die.
In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don’t get older men. As I’m getting older, my audience gets younger!
When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.
Women are the only ones who will be able to eliminate the patriarchy, and when that happens all of us will win, men as much as women.
Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It’s just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.
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.