Isabel Allende Quotes
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A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.
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Heart is what drives us and determines our fate.
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It's such an intimate and profound relationship that it cannot be unconditional. I can only compare the intimacy of sex with the intimacy of the mother with a newborn baby. But with a newborn baby, it is unconditional.
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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.
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The most savory grape, the one that produces the wines with best texture and aroma, the sweetest and most generous, doesn't grow in rich soil but in stony land; the plant, with a mother's obstinacy, overcomes obstacles to thrust its roots deep into the ground and take advantage of every drop of water. That, my grandmother explained to me, is how flavors are concentrated in the grape.
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Just as Daniel Balalcazar said, it makes no sense to suffer in advance a misfortune that may never occur.
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I think I was a feminist before the word was invented.
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The idea of the book ["The Japanese Lover"] came in a conversation that I had with a friend walking in the streets of New York. We were talking about our mothers, and I was telling her how old my mother was, and she was telling me about her mother. Her mother was Jewish, and she said that she was in a retirement home and that she had had a friend for 40 years that was a Japanese gardener. This person had been very important in my friend's upbringing.
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Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death.
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If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving.
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Cooking can be like foreplay.
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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.
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What is truer than truth? Answer: the story.
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You spend the first part of your life collecting things ... and the second half getting rid of them.
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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.
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I'm always following the characters and I'm always interested in what happens to them, but what happens to them is conditioned by the circumstances in which they live.
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Eros is very close to death. And both things, in a way, balance each other.
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I've been a foreigner for the past twenty years. I don't have roots anymore. My roots are in my memory and my writing. That's why memory is so important. Who are you but what you can remember?
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if we don't begin by imagining the perfect society, how shall we create one?
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A man does what he can; a woman does what a man cannot.
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Real soup is to the body what peace is to the soul.
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Women have always been courageous... They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights.
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I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.
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Youth is not a period in life but a state of mind.
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Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.
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For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity.
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Give, give, give-what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away?
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The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.
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In terrible moments, in moments of revolution, of war or repression, of illness or death, people react with incredible strength.
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Everyone in his place and a place for everyone.
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