Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende; born 2 August 1942) is a Chilean-American writer. Allende, whose works sometimes contain aspects of the "magic realist" tradition, is famous for novels such as The House of the Spiritsand City of the Beasts, which have been commercially successful. Allende has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author". In 2004, Allende was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2010, she received Chile's National Literature Prize. President Barack Obama awarded her the...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth2 August 1942
CityLima, Peru
CountryChile
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives.
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.
I don't want an uneventful and safe life, I prefer an adventurous one.
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!
Although women do two-thirds of the world's labor, they own less than one percent of the world's assets.
From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there.
Peace requires everyone to be in the circle - wholeness, inclusion.
Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.
As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.
If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die.
How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?
Writing is a constant exercise in longing.
Nothing's as dangerous as power with impunity.