Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I'm such a control freak. I want to control even my own death. Decide when I will die and how.

I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.

She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.

I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

At my age days dissolve like salt in water; the day's gone and I don't even know what I've done with the hours.

My grandfather was dying, and told the family he had decided to die. ... At that moment I wanted so badly to write and tell him that he was never going to die, that somehow he would always be present in my life, because he had a theory that death didn't exist, only forgetfulness did. He believed that if you can keep people in your memory, they will live forever. That's what he did with my grandmother.