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.

Everything has been said and everything has been done, but you still feel like you are looking for something.

The stories on standardized tests don't have one author, therefore they can never authentically be in the first person. Imagine that! Everywhere, there are these tests that have been written by multiple people.

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.

I was a nerdy kid and I was writing and showing other fellows who are still my friends what I was writing. We were sharing that and kept sharing it. The experiences they had were so different than mine.

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.

The ways in which a standardized language test induces storytelling, for example, is the opposite of creative writing; you have to learn a logical way to start a story, whereas in creative writing you may begin at the end or begin at the middle of the story.