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Isabel Allende


Chilean
August 2, 1942
Writer
sea beach horizon coast landscape
I tend to see the similarities in people and not the differences.


Isabel Allende
Tags: People See Tend
pralongia dolomites alm nature
I try to write the kind of books I like to read.


Isabel Allende
Tags: Like Kind Try
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Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing.


Isabel Allende
Tags: Life Very Our
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If I had to choose between a relative and a good story, I would take the story.


Isabel Allende
Tags: Good Had Would
I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.
Isabel Allende
I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Am I Am Place
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.
Isabel Allende
If this world is going to be a better place for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it will be women who make it so.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Women Who Our
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.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Life Some First
The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential.
Isabel Allende
In times of conflict, war, poverty or religious fundamentalism, women and children are the first and most numerous victims. Women need all their courage today.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Women War Courage
I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!
Isabel Allende
Tags: Because Out Love
I rebelled against all form of authority, against my grandfather, my step-father, the Church, the police, the government, the bosses. Everything male that was there, and was determining my life.
Isabel Allende
I have travelled all over the world and one thing that amazes me is that I can communicate with people. My story may be different but emotionally we are all the same.
Isabel Allende
Tags: People Me World
A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Tell Sense Form
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Freedom Death Me
I write a letter to my mother every day, because in that letter, I write down my day. And if I don't write it down, then tomorrow I will forget it and it's gone.
Isabel Allende
I have become an American citizen, and I love this country. I think that this country has incredible potential for goodness, an incredible possibility for doing the wrong thing, too.
Isabel Allende
If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.
Isabel Allende
On a Tuesday, September 11th, 1973, we had the military coup in Chile that forced me to leave my country eventually. And then, on a Tuesday, September 11th, 2001, we had the terrorist attack in the United States.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Me Had Then
I have more freedom when I write fiction, but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message,' even if I am not even aware that there is one, is conveyed better in this form.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Freedom More Had
Every life of a character is within a context. If I write detached from a social and political background, my story looks like a soap opera where everybody is indoors, not working and living off their emotions.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Like Life Every
I'm very optimistic because I think that the real strength of a nation like the United States comes from blending cultures. There's no way that you can close the frontiers anywhere. The borders are there to be violated permanently.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Strength You Like
I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Me About Think
I have not changed; I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice, and I fall madly in love easily.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Life Love Am
The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential. Because of Paula, I don't cling to anything anymore. Now I like to give much more than to receive.
Isabel Allende
The longest, most solid and complex relationship in my life is with my mother. It started before I was born, and now, when I am 71 and living in California and she is 92 and living in Chile, we are still in touch daily.
Isabel Allende
I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story.
Isabel Allende
Tags: Time Just Get
Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
Isabel Allende
There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized.
Isabel Allende
I never said I wanted a 'happy' life but an interesting one. From separation and loss, I have learned a lot. I have become strong and resilient, as is the case of almost every human being exposed to life and to the world. We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward.
Isabel Allende