Author Profile
Isabel Allende
1942 • Chilean • Writer
60
Total Quotes
Collected Meditations
Showing 60 quotesThe 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.— Isabel Allende
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.— Isabel Allende
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
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.— Isabel Allende
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.— Isabel Allende
I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.— Isabel Allende
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
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.— Isabel Allende
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.— Isabel Allende
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.— Isabel Allende
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.— Isabel Allende
I never thought that I would come to live in the United States. I was not pursuing the American dream.— Isabel Allende
I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.— Isabel Allende
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.— Isabel Allende
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