I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.

Fiction happens in the womb. It doesn't get processed in the mind until you do the editing.

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.

In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.

Only in romance novels or in thrillers people live outside of a social and political context.

A novel is like a window, open to an infinite landscape.