Isabel Allende Quotes

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Isabel Allende

Profession : Writer

Birth : August 2, 1942

Roots are not in landscape or a country, or a people, they are inside you.

Isabel Allende

A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.

Isabel Allende

My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.

Isabel Allende

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

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

My mother didn't want me to be a feminist, a radical, political person, because she was scared. She wanted me to be protected and safe, but my life never was.

Isabel Allende

Feminism has never been sexy, but let me assure you that it never stopped me from flirting, and I have seldom suffered from lack of men.

Isabel Allende

I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp and two dogs to keep me warm.

Isabel Allende

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

Today's girls are tomorrow's women - and leaders.

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

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

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

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

I was born in ancient times, at the end of the world, in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet, so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.

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

One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything.

Isabel Allende

In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters.

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

If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

Isabel Allende