You can say that literature is about topics like love, death, and all that, but I think there is only one topic that applies to all literature and that is belonging.

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.

As a child, all you see is that adults are not playing. Adults are not talking too much. Adults don't want to relate to each other.

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.

If you write, and you are really alone (writing is a lonely thing), you learn to be alone without suffering. When you read, you also learn to do this. When you write, you deal with things.

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

I've been writing most of my life; it's just something I do.