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.

Give, give, give -- what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. 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.

I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.

Most people feel younger than their age, but the culture values youth, success, beauty, productivity. There is no space in this culture for older people.

I like Hillary Clinton a lot. I know her.

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

True friendship resists time, distance, and silence.

With women the best aphrodisiac is words.

I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody.

It is common knowledge that no man that women flock to boasts of his conquests. Those who do, lie.

The biggest straitjacket is all the prejudices that we carry around, and all the fears. But what if we just surrender to the fear? There are things greater than fear. The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute terror, and we do.

The source of my difficulties has always been the same: an inability to accept what to others seems natural, and an irresistible tendency to voice opinions no one wants to hear.

The man of good heart maintained that a moral crisis is produced when the same affluent Catholics (religious people) who faithfully go to mass (church) deny their workers a dignified wage. These words should be engraved on the thousand-peso note, so we never forget them.

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

We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

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

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

That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep.

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.