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.

A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.

The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn't easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn't reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.

I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.

far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die.

People are afraid of falling in love because they don't want to suffer.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.