Isabel Allende

The fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing.

I was a political refugee living in Venezuela. I had a job that was twelve hours a day, no money. It was a hard time.

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.

I am an American citizen and it is my home now. I like the U.S.A., which is not a place too many people have liked since Bush. The U.S. has a young population, and everything can change within a year.

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.

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.

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.

I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

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.' My husband is a writer of crime novels. His name is William Gordon. And so I had to accommodate to his style because that's what he writes. So we decided we'd give it a try. Well, we almost divorced.

I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.

I never thought that I would come to live in the United States. I was not pursuing the American dream.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.

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.

At five I was already a feminist, and nobody used the word in Chile yet.

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.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

Empowering women means trusting them.