I have a very acute sense of place and time, so all of my stories are rooted in a place and a time.
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.
I'm an expert. I can kill anybody and not be caught.
When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it's full of mistakes and repetitions. It's good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It's not a lecture.
More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn't be published. We are in a different moment. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories.
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.
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.
It's going to go away because we all need silence. We all need time to reflect and think. I am not at all pessimistic about this.
I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.
I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
I'm surrounded by the scene of aging. I myself am in my 70s and not getting any younger. Although I'm very healthy, and I have a lot of energy, and I still feel 50, I'm over 70 and I understand that I am preparing for later.
It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional.
The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there.
I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.
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.
You would give your life for your little baby. It's not the same when you are in a sexual relationship unless you feel that you are loved as you love.
I went to a mystery writers conference ... and I learned a lot not only from the faculty - and in the faculty we had forensic doctors, detectives, policemen, experts in guns, etc. - but from the questions of the students.
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.
Only that, nothing more - a tiny beam of light to show some hidden aspect of reality, to help decipher and understand it and thus to initiate, if possible, a change in the conscience of some readers.
I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.
Do you truly believe that life is fair, Senor de la Vega? -No, maestro, but I plan to do everything in my power to make it so.
Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur.
write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.
My father says that fear is good; it's the body's alarm system, it warns us of danger. But sometimes danger can't be avoided, and then you have to forget about being afraid.
Barrabas came to us by the sea.
