Aphrodite is about lust and gluttony - the only two sins worth committing, in my opinion.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.

We have all the technology to record things in the streets. Now the historians cannot twist it or change it, because we have cellular phones or video cameras, and we are filming in the streets what's going on. We have the voices of everybody recorded. There's too much recording and I think that's wonderful.

If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving.

The fastest-growing population in the United States is the older people, because we are living much longer, healthier lives. The problem is, individuals often don't have the resources to take care of older people as they age. This is something that is happening, and we have to deal with it. It was happening also in my life.

She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.

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.