You are told that you have to eliminate un-useful sentences, but as a writer you know how important details are.

Every story, every poem, every written piece is about belonging. There is a me, there is a we, there is an us, and we want to belong to it or we don't want to belong. You can read every story with this as its main focus.

I think about Chilean literature as a family, because I grew up reading the literature of my country. I feel like I have fathers and stepfathers and a lot of brothers and sisters and distant cousins and all that.

We rely too much on the people we share our lives with. We hold them responsible for things they are not even aware of. We start blaming them.

For me, writing is a way of finding out about things I didn't know before I began writing.

Publishing my book is like giving it away. At first you start talking about it, but you are basically letting go. I won't say it's like giving birth because I haven't given birth. It's more like when your children leave home.

When you read a novel, you know what to expect because you've been reading novels for a long time.